As discussed in the Introduction, I used biographical interviews to capture the influence of social and cultural structures on participants’ biographies. Interviews lasted about two hours on average – the longest lasted four hours and 40 minutes, the shortest 35 minutes – and were conducted in Italian. Excerpts for this book were translated by me. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect participants’ anonymity.

Trajectories, capitals, fields

I adopted a semi-structured and open-ended approach. I started the interviews with a question about motivations for moving abroad and let participants develop their own narrative, probing for examples when needed. To situate participants’ migrations within broader social biographies, or trajectories (Bourdieu, 1984: 109– 112), I also asked questions about their life before migration, which produced detailed narratives about their educational and professional biographies. At the end of interviews, I asked participants about their parents’ work and education, if these had not emerged during the interview (see Appendix D for interview topics and questions).

I analysed participants’ access to different forms of capital inductively, paying attention to how this emerged from their biographical narratives and to the specific contexts or ‘fields’ where they accessed and used specific resources (Erel, 2010). My aim was a qualitative exploration of how access (and lack thereof) to specific resources shaped participants’ biographies and identities. Appendix C provides an overview of participants’ social position in Italy (before migration), using education, employment history and parents’ education and professional position as proxies of cultural and economic capital. This is intended as supplementary information to contextualize the biographical narratives discussed in the book, rather than as a stand-alone analysis (see also Atkinson, 2010). Similarly, to better contextualize individual biographies, Appendix B provides additional quantitative data on key variables within the sample. Names and identifying details in Appendix C have been changed to protect anonymity.

Categories of practice

Contrary to most studies about the ‘lived experience’ of meritocracy, discussed in Chapter 1, I did not ask direct questions about meritocracy and inequality. I was interested in how participants’ common-sense, doxic assumptions (Bourdieu, 1972) manifested when they addressed different aspects of their biography, rather than in abstract reflections about meritocracy.