When Talent meets Marriage: Ethnographies of Highly-Skilled Labour Migration, Marriage, Integration, and Binational Family Life in Singapore
Are you a…• Singaporean married/co-habiting with a highly-skilled migrant (with or without children) OR
• Highly-skilled migrant married/cohabiting with a Singaporean (with or without children) OR
• Singaporean who is a parent to foreign child and based in Singapore (incl. single parents) OR
• Highly-skilled migrant who is parent to a Singaporean child and based in Singapore (incl. single parents)
What you can expect…
• Researchers will spend 3-5 hours with you and your family, once monthly for 6 months.
• You will complete a 15min video journal/digital check-in once a fortnight for the 6-month period.
• You will partake in an online workshop after the research is analysed to provide your feedback.
• Participants who decline to be audio-recorded cannot be selected for this study.
What you stand to gain…• Reimbursement of $50 grocery vouchers every 2 weeks/$600 worth in vouchers over 6 months.
• Benefit families like yours by helping policy makers and the general public understand binational families better!
Why are we conducting this study?
The Institute of Policy Studies is conducting an ethnographic study on highly-skilled binational families residing in Singapore, where at least one family member is a born and bred Singaporean. A binational (or occasionally, multi-national) family refers to a family whose members have different nationalities. As the world becomes ever more global, binational families have become microcosms of local-foreign integration, which has increasing importance for many places, but especially for connected cities like Singapore. Binational families represent the only group of residents with fundamental immigration rights in more than one place. If the primary couple is highly-skilled, then the family is especially mobile because they generally have reasonable options for making their livelihood in more than one place. As such, their choice to make a home in Singapore is likely to be meaningful, making them ideal candidates as case studies of local-foreign integration.
Through this study, we seek to understand the lived experience of highly-skilled binational families: We want to know if there is a pattern to how these families emerge, the main similarities and differences that may exist among them, and some of the boons and burdens experienced stemming from highly-skilled binational family structures situated in Singapore. We want to know about the types of considerations that lead these families to settle in Singapore and to better understand the significance of the highly-skilled binational family unit to the broader goal of social integration between locals and foreigners in Singapore.
Study Title: Binational Families and IntegrationReference code: NUS-IRB-2020-304For further details please contact:Dr Kalpana Vignehsa at kalpana.vignehsa@nus.edu.sgInstitute of Policy StudiesLee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS