Revisiting Residential Instability for Immigrant Families through Mixed Methods and Longitudinal Analysis

Keywords: Housing Trajectory, Housing Stability, Sequential Analysis, Mixed Methods, Immigration, Transitional neighborhood, Montreal
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 68

Abstract

This paper offers another look at immigrants housing experiences in the city based on the sequential analysis of residential trajectories, both in time and space, of immigrant families with children in Montreal. Based on a comprehensive analysis of the stages and moments of transition between dwellings, this paper questions the notions of housing stability and instability by redefining them as "the difficulty for a household to choose and maintain itself in housing" instead of defining them as only the frequency of moves. It proposes a quantitative and visual treatment of nearly 60 biographical interviews with immigrant families living in two transitional inner suburbs of Montreal in socio economic transformation, Saint-Michel and Parc-Extension. The systematic work of encoding the interviews helps to reconstruct the long-term housing trajectories of the households since their arrival in Montreal. After an analysis of the number and duration of residential stages for the entire sample, the paper focuses on two key stages: the first night in Canada, and the residential horizon (or long-term housing plan). It then presents original representations of housing trajectories on two different scales, which allow for a longitudinal analysis of their temporal and spatial dimensions, as well as more detailed analyses of individual trajectories, and highlight the hyper instability and concentration of housing trajectories in the Montreal neighborhoods studied.