Dr. Christoph Homuth and Dr. Gisela Will presented the results of a collaborative project with Dr. Elisabeth Liebau from the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) in the panel "Preschool Education". The project used data from the IAB-BAMF-SOEP refugee survey on the one hand and the ReGES study on the other hand to investigate the influence of social and cultural aspects on the daycare centers attendance of refugee children. In addition, ReGES staff member Ebru Balaban-Feldens participated in one of the virtual poster sessions with a paper on "Family interactions in the context of migration among preschool and primary school children."

Homuth, Will, and Liebau showed: in the group of over three-year-olds, just under 80% of preschool children with a refugee background living in Germany attend a daycare center; among those under the age of three, the figure is 14%. In some cases, these values are significantly lower than for children without a migration background or with a migration background without a cause of flight. The results of multiple linear probability models show that the mechanisms of social and ethnic inequalities already known in the literature (such as parental education and labor market participation) largely explain the differences in participation rates among refugees. This is especially true for the 0 to 3 age group. Here, the differences between natives, children with a migration background and children with a refugee biography can be fully explained by these mechanisms. In the age group of four- to five-year-old children, too, differences in participation rates in preschool education can largely be attributed to social and migration-specific factors. In addition, it turns out that children from newly immigrated families with a refugee biography are more likely to attend a daycare center the longer the families have already been in Germany.

At the poster session, Ebru Balaban-Feldens presented her doctoral project "Family Interactions in the Context of Migration among Preschool and Elementary School Children," which is being prepared as part of the ReGES study. The aim of the project is to investigate the characteristics of process quality (family interactions, parenting styles and family climate) in German, Turkish and Syrian families. In particular, the project builds on the question of what differences and similarities exist between the various immigrant groups with and without a refugee background and how migration- and refugee-specific factors affect the characteristics of process quality. The doctoral project is based on data from the NEPS for families without a refugee background as well as data from the ReGES refugee study. Balaban-Feldens presented the research model she chose according to Tietze, W., Becker-Stoll, F., Bensel, J., Eckhardt, A. G., Haug-Schnabel, G., Kalicki, B., Keller, H., & Leyendecker, B. (2013) as well as her initial working hypotheses.

To the Project ReGES

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