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Research on transnational youth mobilities has shown the importance of visits to the 'home' country for young people's identities, sense of belonging and access to resources. Yet what transpires on these visits and how do young people agentically shape their experiences? This paper brings into dialogue scholarship on 'homeland' mobilities, trajectories and temporalities to shed light on how youth experience their attachments to a 'homeland' and reveal the mechanisms through which young people's lives are affected by 'home' visits. We use the temporal concept of pacing, recently developed in mobility studies, to analyze how young people experience 'home' visits at different moments in their lives. Drawing on 18 months of multi‐sited ethnographic fieldwork using mobile methods with Ghanaian‐background youth who live in Belgium, we show that visits to Ghana are experienced differently by youth throughout their life time in relation to how much control they exert over the pacing of their visits. Through their mobility and their practices before, during and after 'home' visits, young people craft affective experiences with people and places in Ghana and experience different paces of life across space and time. This ultimately shapes how young people imagine a future 'good life' that involves a transnational lifestyle and that has the 'right pace' by incorporating aspects of life from both Belgium and Ghana. A focus on pacing and trajectories contributes to acknowledging both temporal and spatial dimensions of transnational youth mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This special issue aims to address the gap in transnational families studies by identifying if there are common patterns and effects of transnational family life across countries and regions, using cross‐country comparative analyses. In this editorial introduction, we highlight the overarching themes emerging from seven papers, which employ new large‐scale surveys specifically designed to collect information about transnational family life across different Latin American, African, and Southeast Asian countries and China. We discuss how these comparative studies offer new ways of understanding transnational families by focusing on their prevalence, composition, the experiences of their members, and how these change over time. We also highlight how differing and changing notions of care over space and a person's lifetime influence how transnational families are created, reproduced, maintained, and experienced. In general, the issue as a whole emphasises the need to take structural factors in both sending and receiving contexts into account when studying the form that transnational families take, how this changes over time, and the general and specific gendered effects they have on different members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Studies indicated differences between transnational family life for migrant mothers and fathers and that the effects on their “left‐behind” children differ according to who migrates. Yet little is known about why these differences exist. This paper aims to fill this gap by comparing transnational and nontransnational African families with parents living in Europe to understand their different family structures. We analyse three datasets with information on migrants from five African origin countries in eight European countries. Our analyses reveal important differences between transnational and nontransnational families and between transnational mothers and fathers. Transnational mothers are more often single, have children from multiple relationships, and start family life earlier than transnational fathers and nontransnational parents. This corresponds closely to what family sociologists have found make “fragile families” among nonmigrants. Our work thus indicates that policies aiming to improve migrants' lives need to consider the disadvantages that particularly migrant women experience in maintaining their family life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is one of the first large-scale analyses on child psychological well-being in the context of parental migration when children remain in an African country. As such, it contributes to the literature by investigating some of the insights gained from in-depth transnational family studies, and it also provides evidence from Africa where normative contexts around family life differ from Latin America, Southeast Asia, and East Asia where most studies have been conducted to date. A survey was conducted in 2010/2011 with 2,760 secondary school children and youths in high out-migration areas of Ghana. Using multiple regression analysis, we find that being in a transnational family is associated with lower levels of psychological well-being, yet only in families where parents are divorced or separated. Furthermore, when parents are in a relationship, specific characteristics of transnational family arrangements are associated with lower levels of child psychological well-being, while others are not. In particular, whether a parent migrates internally or internationally, who the caregiver is, and having a good relationship with the migrant parent are not associated with poorer well-being outcomes. Instead, if a father migrates, if the child changes caregivers more than once, and if the child has a bad relationship with his or her migrant father are associated with lower levels of well-being. This study adds nuance to a field of research that has emphasised negative outcomes and helps identify policy areas to improve the well-being of children in transnational families. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migrant parents from the Global South who migrate to the Global North often leave their children in the origin country either by choice or as a result of stringent migration policies in migrant-receiving countries that make family migration impracticable. Small-scale, qualitative studies have indicated that these transnational parents experience emotional and health difficulties due to separation. Few studies have investigated these effects on a larger scale using quantitative data, and no previous studies compared their findings with a control group. The current paper used a survey that was conducted with 303 Ghanaian migrant parents living in the Netherlands to examine the effects of transnational family life on self-reported health and subjective well-being (as measured through satisfaction with life and emotional well-being). The study shows that migrant parents who are separated from their children display worse outcomes than their counterparts who live with their children in the destination country. Importantly, however, these differences were mediated by these parents' lower socio-economic and undocumented status. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When collecting migrants' life stories, researchers often report on the role of chance encounters in influencing the way migration trajectories have taken shape or how migrants have managed their lives in a new country. Aside from reporting on such encounters, however, there have been no explicit efforts to theorise chance or to make it central to in-depth analysis in migration studies. This paper aims to theorise the role of chance encounters in migrants' trajectories by drawing on insights from the psychology literature of chance encounters and life paths. Our analysis of the role of chance encounters, structured by the interplay between environmental and personal factors, suggests that how people deal with chance is an influential factor in the ways people migrate from the Global South to the Global North and manage their lives in transit. The paper makes use of evidence collected among 46 African migrants in Ukraine during 7 months of field research in 2011-2012 and reflects on the methodological implications in studying chance. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on the migration-development nexus has focused on the outcomes of remittances received by the inhabitants of countries in the Global South. This paper argues that this conceptualisation of remittances as one-way flows obscures the fact that remittances are part of reciprocal social relations. As such, they also entail flows of goods, money, and especially services from countries in the Global South to migrants, or what is called reverse remittances. The paper contributes to emerging literature on reverse remittances by broadening the conceptualisation of reverse remittances and presenting an analysis of their characteristics as well as those of receivers and providers. We find that most remittances from home communities to migrants are in the form of services rendered. These include childcare and helping with migrants' investments in housing and business. Furthermore, we elaborate on another type of reverse remittance overlooked in the literature: services conducted to help migrants obtain documents to regularise their stays in the host country. The type of reverse remittance received differs for documented and undocumented migrants, and the providers differ according to kin and non-kin relations. Depending on their significance, reverse remittances can be important in determining whether and how migration can lead to a betterment of people's lives in the Global South and are therefore relevant for the migration-development nexus, which has heretofore neglected their existence. The analysis is based on a simultaneous matched sample methodology conducted with 131 migrants in the Netherlands and their network members in Ghana, using both quantitative and qualitative analyses. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]