A view from the origin: Examining happiness through a relative deprivation lens

The question of what makes transnational immigrant families happier requires knowing what it means to be happy from both sides of the border.  Researchers have established that levels of happiness vary according to location and that happiness does not have a consistent relationship to wealth or resources for the general population and for migrants in particular.  To date, the happiness research for transmigrants has largely focused on the destination community where immigrants may not necessarily reside permanently, hence neglecting the transnational aspect of migrants’ lives.  Missing from the literature is how happiness is constructed at the origin, which is necessary to better understand the complexity of this concept in a transnational field. 

Given that the concept of relative deprivation is often cited as a mechanism that encourages migration at a community level, this lens provides a useful framework to assess how migrants in the U.S. and non-migrants in origin communities construct happiness and relative happiness.  This paper relies on a mixed methods approach to understanding happiness for migrant and non-migrant families from an origin community in Mexico.  The Network Survey of Immigrant Transnationalism (NSIT) (n=600) serves as the main data source for this project.  NSIT is an innovative binational survey of a migration network connecting a Mexican immigrant community in North Carolina and Texas to friends and family in their hometown in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico.  Follow-up interviews focused on happiness and relative deprivation were conducted in 2011 (n=15) through case selection based on reported levels of happiness, position in binational social network, and migration experience.  This paper contributes to a better understanding of the spheres of influence that are important in thinking about well-being for transnational migrant communities.  It also introduces a new means for examining happiness in transnational contexts. 

Network Survey of Immigrant Transnationalism: (http://www.tedmouw.info/Binational%20Network%20working%20papers.htm)