Events

This workshop is supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 2 [MOE 2015-T2–1–008, PI: Brenda Yeoh]. We are grateful to Wellcome Trust [GR079946/ B/ 06/ Z; GR079946/ Z/ 06/ Z]; Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 2 [MOE 2015-T2–1–008]; and the Hong Kong Research Grants council through its General Research Fund (Project no. 17606815) for funding the research presented in this workshop.

As a region that has experienced major socio-political and economic transitions in recent decades, Southeast Asia provides a richly variegated terrain to explore the gendered lives and experiences of men and women in a globalizing world of increased migrations and mobilities. In the last few decades, both men and (increasing proportions of) women from Indonesia and the Philippines have joined global and regional circuits of labour migration, as fixed-term workers on temporary contracts (Yeoh and Huang, 2014; Bailey and Yeoh, 2014). These migrations have led to the rising prominence of transnational families, where children grow up with one or both parents away during significant years of their childhood (Graham and Yeoh, 2013; Jordan and Graham, 2012; Graham and Jordan, 2011). Despite the public outcry against the potential erosion of the fabric of society often attributed to the rising number of women – particularly mothers – becoming overseas labour migrants (Parreñas, 2008), there remains a lack of knowledge of the impact of parental migration during formative childhood years on the children themselves, particularly on the later transition of these children as they assume adult roles in different spheres such as tertiary higher education, employment and family formation. This is surprising because a primary motivation for parental overseas migration is typically to improve the life chances of the next generation (Yeoh, Huang, and Lam, 2005; Stark and Bloom, 1985) and yet if there has indeed been improvements or not in concrete or non-material ways remain unclear. This special issue explores the longer-term impacts of growing up in transnational households on young people’s wellbeing using two waves of data (2008, 2016) from the Child Health and Migrant Parents in Southeast Asia (CHAMPSEA) study conducted in Indonesia and the Philippines.

To date, almost all of the evidence on the longer-term impact of a childhood lived in a transnational family setting on the subsequent transition to adulthood comes from smaller scale qualitative studies, predominantly retrospective in design (Parreñas, 2005, 2008). There have, to our knowledge, been no past mixed method nor systematic studies with a focus on Southeast Asia. This lack of systematic research seems especially notable because migrant parents routinely sacrifice more proximate relationships with their sons, daughters and spouses to advance their children’s future life chances, apparently without knowledge of whether their sacrifice is ultimately worthwhile. The papers in this collection seek to contribute further empirical evidence to address this critical gap. This special issue draws on two broad areas of research literature – on transnational families and child development (specifically the youth transition to adulthood) to examine young people’s wellbeing across diverse and overlapping domains.

The six empirical papers in this workshop utilise two waves of data from the CHAMPSEA project (N=428 in Indonesia and N=392 in the Philippines). CHAMPSEA is a mixed methods longitudinal study with data collected in Indonesia and the Philippines (Graham and Yeoh, 2013). Surveys were originally conducted in 2008 with circa 1000 households in each of the two countries. Qualifying households contained a child in one of two age cohorts – a younger child cohort (aged 3, 4, and 5 in 2008) and an older child cohort (aged 9, 10, and 11 in 2008). The sample, while not representative of the total population of each study country, was selected using a systematic and replicable sampling design based on sentinel site methodology from public health studies (see Graham and Yeoh, 2013 for details). The strictly implemented protocol employed a flexible quota sampling approach to capture a minimum number of households with mother and father migrants, respectively, as well as an approximately equal number of male and female children within the target age ranges. Identical data were also collected from a sample of non-migrant households, which are used as a comparison group. The same households were revisited in 2016 when the second wave survey was conducted. Considerable effort was put into minimising attrition; 83.40 percent of households in Indonesia, and 80.49 percent of households in the Philippines, were traced and re-interviewed. The papers use a subset of the CHAMPSEA data for the older child cohort (aged 16-20 in 2016).