As the autumn semester was ending, migrantologist and researcher Dr. Violetta Parutis — from the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER), University of Essex, United Kingdom and assistant to the survey director of the longitudinal UK Household Longitudinal Study Understanding Society — completed her visit at the Sociology Department of Vytautas Magnus University.
Dr. Parutis is the first participant in the Vytautas Kavolis Interdisciplinary Professorship Visiting Program. She began her visit in the spring with a remote seminar titled “Polish and Lithuanian migration to the United Kingdom: challenges and experiences.” In that seminar, drawing on her extensive research experience, she presented on Polish and Lithuanian migration to the United Kingdom since their countries joined the European Union, including research perspectives on the topic. She discussed the migrants’ path from being newcomers to becoming integrated community members, transnational citizens, or returnees — especially after the Brexit process.
From May 9–12, she held a highly attended four-part methodological seminar series titled “Theory and practice of survey design and implementation.” In these sessions, she thoroughly introduced students and researchers to different theoretical discussions and practical principles of survey design and implementation, differences among data collection methods and their impacts on survey errors, solutions to these challenges, stages of survey management, control procedures, ethical obligations, alternative data collection approaches, and innovations. She also shared many examples of survey applications and various experiments conducted within the UK Household Longitudinal Study (Understanding Society).
During the autumn semester (October 19–26), Dr. Parutis delivered a series of lectures for undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students in the social sciences and humanities. These lectures covered various interview techniques — including asynchronous and synchronous interviews and biographical interviewing — exploring both concepts and their practical applications. On October 18, she also organized another seminar titled “‘I would leave again only over my dead body!’: Return or double return migration among Lithuanian and Polish (re)migrants.” In this seminar, she noted that although research on return migration is growing, less is known about what happens to emigrants after they return. She reviewed results from a study analyzing the plans of Polish and Lithuanian returnees regarding further mobility.
Dr. Parutis’s visit at Vytautas Magnus University was supported by the Vytautas Kavolis Interdisciplinary Professorship Visiting Program, and the scholarship for her visit was established by the Dana Gedvilienė Fund administered by the Lithuanian Foundation. This Professorship program is a collaborative initiative designed to bring visiting lecturers from the Lithuanian diaspora to VDU, with the goal of strengthening interdisciplinary approaches in study programs and enhancing connections with the global Lithuanian academic community.
