Project leader: Carl Nordlund, Linköping University
Project duration: 2021-2026
Participating countries: Sweden, Finland and Denmark
Funding from NordForsk: 13,933,625 NOK
Project website: NordInt.net
This project has built capacity and expertise in network-scientific register-based research on ethnic relations and integration. Three core topics in ethnic relations research have been approached from a network-scientific perspective. This is inter-ethnic family formation ties, labour market integration and discrimination, and various sociodemographic aspects linked to residential segregation. Often utilizing available full-population micro-level register data in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden.
Impact story
The project has advanced understanding of how social, spatial, and structural forces shape ethnic integration across Nordic societies. By linking large-scale register data with advanced computational and network-analytic approaches, it reveals how geography and opportunity structures influence who forms partnerships with whom, how ethnic boundaries persist or blur, and how spatially anchored social networks have an impact on integration in different social domains.
In Sweden, the research demonstrates that residential segregation and demographic change — rather than cultural preference alone — sustain social divisions, while also identifying the emergence of broader pan-ethnic connections. In Denmark, the work has clarified how neighborhood contexts and internal migration flows structure both integration and marginalization, offering a dynamic view of how neighborhoods function. In Finland, analyses of fertility and migration patterns across ancestry groups have challenged conventional assumptions about cultural explanations, highlighting institutional and generational drivers instead.
Together, these studies establish new methodological tools and comparative insights for understanding the network dynamics of ethnic integration and their implications for social cohesion in increasingly diverse societies.
Key findings
The study examines how geography, ethnicity, and structural factors shape patterns of partnership, integration, and fertility across Nordic societies. Despite the digital era’s potential to expand partner markets, geography remains crucial: people are far more likely to form unions with nearby partners. Ethnic endogamy persists most strongly among non-Western immigrants, particularly those of African, Middle Eastern, and Asian origin, though much of this is explained by residential proximity and segregation rather than direct preferences.
Analyses of Sweden reveal that inter-ethnic family formation follows overlapping pan-ethnic boundaries rather than distinct national lines, reflecting both cultural ties and social distance. Over three decades, ethnic boundaries in Sweden show no signs of hardening; instead, shifts in partnership patterns largely stem from demographic and spatial changes.
In Denmark, neighborhood composition has limited influence on immigrants’ employment outcomes, highlighting the dominance of structural over social factors. Neighborhoods function as dynamic, shifting contexts shaped by migration flows rather than fixed determinants.
In Finland, fertility patterns reveal generational divides across ancestry groups and emphasize institutional rather than cultural explanations. Finally, homophilic unions prove more stable than inter-ethnic ones, underlining how structural inequalities and gender-income dynamics shape intimacy and social cohesion.
Key outputs
Multiple journal publications, preprints, working paper, and two PhD theses in the making on the substantial topic of inter-ethnic relations and integration in the originally outlined fields of family formation, labor market integration, and residential segregation – see https://nordint.net/?page=output
Novel advances in network-analytical methods of general applicability, as well as novel application of network-analytical methods and novel usage of various datasets to develop the fields of network science and computational social science at large.
Development of a novel software client for network-analytical blockmodeling – socnet.se – that, in an interdisciplinary fashion, combines advanced computer-scientific search heuristics with the classical sociological ideas on social roles and social structure. Available as a compiled client for all major operating systems and architectures, as well as fully open source.
Two doctoral students (and forthcoming PhD holders) with specializations in the substantive fields of inter-ethnic relations and integration, Nordic register data, and the application of advanced network-scientific methods to address such questions.