Trajectoires et Origines : Enquête sur la diversité des populations en France

Trajectoires et origines. Enquête sur la diversité des populations en France, Cris Beauchemin, Christelle Hamel et Patrick Simon (dir.), Collection : Grandes Enquêtes INED

France has been an immigrant-receiving country for over a century and is now a multicultural society with an unprecedented level of origin diversity. And while immigrants and their descendants are targets of clichés and stereotyping, little is known of their situation in quantitative terms.

Concerned to acquire this missing statistical knowledge, INED and INSEE joined forces for a wide-ranging survey of France’s population in all its diversity, with special emphasis on discrimination. Trajectoires et Origines (TeO), a survey of 22,000 persons, marks a new phase in quantitative research on immigrants and their descendants. Is origin in itself a factor of inequalities or simply of differential access to society’s resources? With its detailed reconstitutions of educational, occupational and conjugal trajectories and its exploration of access to housing and health, TeO provides several approaches to answering this question.

One of the work’s major contributions is to have combined objective and subjective perspectives on discrimination: this is the first research study in France to focus on racism as experienced by those subjected to it, while opening up new methodological perspectives on studying experienced prejudice by origin, religion, and skin colour.

Cris Beauchemin,  INED researcher, is specialized in international migration, transnational families and relations between migration and development.

Christelle Hamel, sociologist and INED researcher, studies gender relations in migration contexts, forced marriage, and relations between violence and gender

Patrick Simon is a social demographer at INED specialized in issues of integration, discrimination and multicultural citizenship.