The longer-term impact of parental migration on youth educational outcomes: Examining the trade-off of physical proximity versus financial gains

Abstract

Despite well recognized motivation of parental migration to improve the educational opportunities of their left-behind children, there is a lack of empirical evidence, especially of studies using longitudinal data in migration studies. The current study brings a longitudinal approach to examine how different experience of early childhood parental migration influences the educational trajectories of children as they enter young adulthood. We adopt a life course perspective by applying sequence analysis on the educational histories of young adults in Thailand. The study brings together two complementary cohort studies of families in areas of high outmigration in Thailand, CHAMPSEA (families of international migrants) and CLAIM (families of internal migrants). We selected data from 873 children, who were first interviewed in early adolescence and re-interviewed in 2019/2020 in early adulthood (aged 20 to 24) (n=873). First, the results from sequence analysis describe and visualize the educational trajectories of the young adults from primary school through school completion/leaving. Second, typology analysis captures the patterns and transitions to different educational track with four distinctive patterns of the young adults’ educational trajectories: 1) children with early dropout (n=242); 2) children with academic senior high school track (n=225); 3) children with vocational high school track (n=164); 4) children with higher education record (n=242). Third, preliminary multivariate analysis identifies the important roles of child gender and migration status of parents (especially father’s) experienced in early childhood in explaining different trajectory patterns, after controlling for household socio-economic factors. The current study enriches the understanding of the longer-term influence of childhood experiences of parental migration on diverse educational pathways using the case of Thailand. The findings offer insight to guide policy and family decision-making for other countries experiencing high levels of migration within the ASEAN region.