Powroty Polaków po 2004 roku, W pętli pułapki migracji

This paper analyses Poles’ return from emigration from an empirical perspective. It also discusses the difficulties involved in research on return migrants. Firstly, there is no single definition of a return migrant which would be binding for all countries; secondly, many countries do not keep statistics on returnees. Hence, research on return migration concentrates on purposive samples which may indicate certain types of phenomena, strategies and problems within the analysed group, but do not allow generalization. The paper presents the results of a quantitative survey carried out in five cities, viz. Warsaw, Poznań, Gdańsk, Rzeszów and Katowice, on a group of 200 return migrants (40 in each of the above locations). The survey was conducted in Spring 2010. The respondents were selected using snowball sampling.