Phenomenological Perspective in Researching Immigrant Children’s Experience

Abstract

Background and Aim of Study: Migration is a complicated and complex social phenomenon. Arriving in a new country, immigrants find themselves in a strange, unfamiliar environment; simultaneously they may have left behind almost everything that they had in their home country. Such a life event changes the relationship between a person and their things: immigrants lose their connection with the things left behind, while new connections with the things of the host country have yet to be forged. This is a natural process of an adult’s migration. But what is it like for a child? The aim of the study: to reflect the experiences of immigrant children and their changing relationship with things in phenomenological methodology approach. Material and Methods: The article is based on hermeneutic phenomenology, when children migrating is analysed as a phenomenon. In order to investigate such phenomena phenomenology as a research strategy is applied. Its data were collected using several methods. The main method was the unstructured phenomenological interview with children and adults who due to economic reasons left their home country and came to live in another while being children together with their parents (or one of them). Having changed the country, they had also to change schools. Results: Show the uniqueness of the children migration experience and reflects it in the phenomenological matter. Conclusions: Children migration experience is often underestimated from the position of grown-ups, while children view migration differently, as they see things, objects and space around them differently (they see, feel and imagine world in a totally unique manner). That is why children taken out of their usual and normal lifestyle, home space facing totally different world, with strange and unfamiliar things, facing the world of unpredictability, temporality and eternity, fantasy and dreams, where misunderstood, or unnoticed are left alone, even while being surrounded by people.