Dr. Zuzanna Brunarska’s project funded in the competition for research projects at CESS

24 01 2024

The project of Dr. Zuzanna Brunarska from the Centre of Migration Research “The impact of stories on attitudes toward emigration and personal migration aspirations” was funded in the competition for research projects at the Centre of Excellence in Social Sciences.

The project received funding in the amount of 70 795,06 PLN.

Project description: The project deals with a question of whether persuasive messages emphasizing the negative or positive sides of emigration influence how people feel about emigration. We are interested in whether stories on emigration shape attitudes toward both emigration of co-nationals and people’s own migration aspirations (understood broadly as desires, intentions, plans, or expectations). Based on experimental data collected in the United States, we will test effects of both narratives in which migration is portrayed in a negative light and those in which it is portrayed in a positive light. We will also test if the effect of narratives depends on people’s previous experience with emigration. We plan to examine: 1) if a migration-encouraging story makes people more positive, while migration-discouraging story makes them more negative towards emigration 2) If the effect of the story depends on how we measure migration aspirations; and 3) if personal or family migration experience and having contact with friends and relatives who moved abroad play a role in how people react to the story.