Groups!

After hearing about everyone's fabulous ideas and doing some thinking, Jana, John, and I have decided to form a group. We intend focus on immigration issues in the Netherlands. We haven't yet decided what our official broad question is going to be but taking on the topic of immigration gives us a lot of freedom. So far we are thinking of exploring factors that may influence degrees of assimilation such as country of origin, religion, age of immigration, etc. One problem we foresee in trying to conduct our research is that much of our findings will rely on the willingness of people to speak with us honestly about their experiences. Jana came up with a great way of measuring levels of assimilation by developing a questionnaire that poses questions about languages spoken, which news is watched, whether those surveyed tend to socialize primarily with those from their country of origin, and if they are still in frequent contact with their country of origin. Using a survey such as this will allow anonymity which could get more people to participate. Also, we are planning to visit different cultural community centers in hopes of finding some willing individuals to be sources of information about life as an immigrant and assimilation issues. One other thing I would like to explore is the concept of forced tolerance; in order to assimilate into Dutch society, are immigrants forced to be tolerant? We still don't really know if it is possible to truly measure the existence/degree of forced tolerance, but this may change. One possible way of looking at this topic would be to examine Dutch immigration policies and how they approach the topic of assimilation (e.g. Clifford mentioned that there is a video that immigrants are required to watch upon entering the Netherlands that sort of forces the acceptance of prostitution and drugs).
Since we have a broad topic and we want to be able to have flexibility with our research, we are planning on going with an international engagement.