Children’s and Adolescents’ Peer Networks and Migrant Integration

Abstract

With a special focus on immigrant families, this chapter elaborates on the relationship between assimilation, multiculturalism, spatial segregation, and social networks. Different outcomes of immigrant integration are explained by the model of intergenerational integration, which combines micro- and macro-level analyses in one comprehensive framework. Individual or family-related investment decisions play a crucial role in this model, but also ethnic boundaries, which are closely related to ethnically mixed or segregated social networks. Following an overview of empirical studies on inter- and intra-ethnic ties in social networks, the intergenerational interdependence of these ties, and the effect of residential segregation, it will be argued that latent or manifest ethnic conflict can be a result of ethnic boundaries and inequalities.