Psychology of migration processes
From 9th till 13th of September on the base of the ILSCR, the short training course (workshop) “Psychology of migration processes” took place. The course was a part of the training program of the ILSCR “Advanced theory and methodology in social sciences”.
The lecturer was Eugene Tartakovsky, PhD, professor at University of Tel-Aviv, Israel. The audience of the course consisted of member of ILSCR, lecturers of Department of Organizational Psychology, staff of other HSE faculties, and students of Master program “Applied Social Psychology”.
In his lectures, E. Tartakovsky emphasized that migration is a worldwide phenomenon. Top ten countries with the largest number of international migrants includes: USA, Russia, Germany, France, Saudi Arabia, Canada, India, Great Britain, Spain and Australia . Annually over 200 million of people in the world migrates. Israel stands out from other countries due to a peculiar history: it was founded by Jews, which had been migrated from different countries. Due to this peculiarity, Israel is the most interesting for studying migration processes.
Lecturer mentioned different approaches for understanding the motivation of immigrants: push-pull theory (Lee, 1966), neoclassical economic theory (Malmberg, 1997) and multifactor theory of motivation for immigration (including macro-level (country level), meso-level (social networks) and micro-level (personality factors)). Eugene Tartakovsky also mentioned basic theories of intergroup relations and discrimination against immigrants. An important condition for fighting against discrimination is highlighting of these issues on the state level.
Then topics of acculturation and social adaptation were discussed. The lecturer presented several studies on the identity problems of migrants, and he noted problems appear in adapting to new community (linguistic, economical, related to physical and mental health, etc.).
At the end of his course E. Tartakovsky presented a full cycle of cross-cultural training for migrants, that includes all stages of adaptation from preparations before departure to the country of migration till working with concrete issues after immigration.