Hi folks,
of course you are tired being asked for interviews. BUT this one should be fun and is different - let me promise you! For more details please do read the following letter.
Our goal is, to show as a result of our studie, how difficult the situation is in Germany for high qualified persons from abroad. Official institutions are going to learn from this to make things better ...
I'm very much looking forward to responses we do need desperately interviewpartners. (They are not easy to be found.)
So, thank you very much in advance und have a nice day
sincerely yours,
Ulli Ofner (ulof@zedat.fu-berlin.de)
P.S.our 'official' letter for more details
FREIE UNIVERSITÄT BERLIN
Fachbereich Erziehungswissenschaft u. Psychologie
Arbeitsbereich Interkulturelle Erziehungswissenschaft
Forschungsprojekt Kulturelles Kapital in der Migration

Dr. Ulrike Selma Ofner

Freie Universität Berlin
Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin (Raum KL 23/ 335) FU BERLIN

Zeichen: Of/es
Tel.: 030 / 838 56195

e-mail: ulof@zedat.fu-berlin.de
url: www.fu-ice.de/ab/staff/ofner.html




Ladies and Gentlemen,

we are looking for people willing to grant us an interview for our research project »Cultural Capital in Migration«. Since you are academically trained, we’d be glad if you accepted our invitation for an interview.

Ours is an interdisciplinary and internationally oriented team. We are financed by the Volkswagen Foundation (http://www.volkswagen-stiftung.de).

Highly qualified migrants contribute to the prosperity of »knowledge societies«, the most important capital of which is their members’ educational potential. Supporting and accepting professional degrees as well as facilitating formal entry regulations for immigrants opens opportunities for society. Limiting and neglecting these, on the contrary, can easily become a problem for all involved: The German labour market for instance is increasingly in need of high qualifications, but the Federal Republic so far hardly succeeds in recruiting academically trained migrants. The reasons for this discrepancy we intend to analyse in our study »Cultural Capital in Migration«.Therefore we’d like to have talks both with persons satisfied and those more or less unsatisfied with their job, their environment or the general situation in their country of immigration.

Since you are a highly educated migrant, we’d like to conduct a biographic interview with you. We don’t use a questionnaire because we are interested in whatever you’d like to tell us concerning the subject. Therefore we ask you for a non-prestructured [an unstructured] talk. It is a well-tried method letting the interviewees tell their biography without interrupting them and only asking questions afterwards. In any case] you are the one who decides what to talk about and what to leave out. Since we can’t trust our memory, we will be recording the interviews on tape. Of course, all data will be handled anonymously and in absolute confidence.

We aren’t solely motivated by scientific curiosity. The findings of our study are intended to improve the situation of migrants and will lead to recommendations for political and institutional action.

I’d be glad to meet you. Please contact me for further details or questions.

Yours sincerely,
Ulrike Ofner

P.S.: A few words concerning myself: After leaving Austria I studied Social Anthropology. My PhD thesis dealt with academically trained migrants of the so called 2nd generation of Turks.