<p>My initial reason for choosing this topic was that I thought I had found some deficiencies in Trovato and Halli's papers (1983, 1990), in which they used "ethnic effects" to explain the differences in geographic mobility levels among 7 major ethnic groups in Canada, using the PUMFs (Public Use Microdata Files) of the 1971 and 1981 censuses. They reported some inconsistencies between their expectations based on the "ethnic effect" hypothesis and their empirical findings, especially for Ukrainians, who were expected to have a lower propensity to make long-distance migration than average, but appeared to be more migratory. Originally I thought that the inconsistencies were due to the fact that they did not control for the general effects of the major regional differences in the spatial economy of Canada and the specific economic situation during the period of 1976-1981 on the propensities to make interptovincial migration.</p> <p>However, as I tried to reproduce their empirical work, I realized that although the spatial and temporal factors are important for the study of internal migration in Canada, the omission of them was not the main fault of the work. The real problem was not what Trovato and Halli failed to incorporate in their models, but how they interpreted their multivariate results.</p> <p>Taking this discovery as one of the major findings, much more empirical work was then done to get a better sense of the real migration situation for the ethnic groups in not only 1976-81 but also 1981-86 and 1996-2001. The finding of the low mobility levels ofItalians and Jews led to the further step of testing the economic niche theory. When using the long-form records of2001 census, the notice of the existence of new information made me carry out some additional work for the second-generation immigrants as well.</p> <p>What needs to be clarified here is that Chapter 3 in this thesis is co-authored with Dr. Kao-Lee Liaw. The author's contributions include analysis of the data, development of tables, and the writing of the first draft as well as many discussions with Dr. Liaw.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/10388 |
| Date | 07 1900 |
| Creators | Ma, Xiaomeng |
| Contributors | Liaw, Kao-Lee, Geography and Earth Sciences |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
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