Social Networks and International Migration: a comparative structural analysis with data collected by interviewing and user data from Facebook

The structural analysis of international migration system between Brazil and the United States seeks to provide contributions to the understanding of the empirical phenomenon through the role of the mechanisms intervenient in the system. The social network analysis seeks to identify regular patterns of the positions occupied by actors and relational flows. Brazil currently has 60 million users on Facebook and their data structure allows to collect data comparable to previous studies about the structure of the social network migration. The objective of this paper is to analyze the structure of the social network migration of Governador Valadares City, from interviews with residents in the region, and to compare the results of this survey with the structure captured by overlapping the personal network of Facebook users in the same region. The first part of this analysis was based on a field research where 60 individuals were interviewed that had some relation to migration. The second step will consist in the construction of the network migration from the overlapping personal networks of Facebook users and compatibilization with the first survey. Networks measurements were produced for the first data source and it is expected that processing performed between the two sources have similarities.