Family Perspective in Migration: A Qualitative Analysis on Turkish Families in Italy

The main purpose of this research is to understand the migration phenomenon from a family perspective because family, as a relational social unit, can be a lens which reflects the transnational and intergenerational impacts of migration both on receiving and sending society. For the main purposes of this study I will refer to a relational definition of the family. Donati (2007) argues that family, different theoretical sociological approaches have framed/ considered the family as a structure of roles created by external factors like the social division of labour, the level of economic development, the type of political regime or communicative technologies. This vision caused the exclusion of the relational character of the family from its definition. Family is thus seen as a unit which is driven by the external forces that are not directly related to human experience “while it should be observed instead as a morphogenetic network of relations, or rather as a primordial and original network emerging from the mediations that the family, as a sui generis social relation, act between nature and culture, between public and private, between individual and society (Donati, 2007: 10).