British Expatriate Network

Hi there,

I am currently researching for my undergraduate dissertation and was hoping to pick the brains of some British Expats. My title is "Home from Home How expatriate lifestyles affect/impact people's sense of belonging and home".

I am basically looking into how the inevitable moving around and uprooting of expatriate lives makes people feel; looking at what people do to feel more at home in the new country? Where would they say they were "from"? (Which i've found is a much more complicated question than it first sounds!) Where would they call "home"? If they have kids, does this make moving around a lot easier or more complicated? How connected to the UK do they feel? (eg. do you still vote in the UK? Do you have a home in the UK? etc). I have a continuing list of questions, but that is the general type, and was hoping to start up a discussion about these sorts of topics.

I have been a expatriate child all my life, moving around due to my dad's job, and because of this feel a close tie to this topic. I hope you can help.

Many thanks,
Beccy

undergraduate dissertation eh? Yikes, I'm glad I didn't have to do one of those! Anyway, I'm happy to help. How are you doing this? Do you have some kind of questionnaire or a specific question to start the ball rolling on the forum? If the latter, might I suggest different threads for different questions? Otherwise it might get confusing and the threads incredibly long.

Happy to help if I can. Feel free to email me.

Happy to help.

Id be happy to help you in email mode .

Thanks everyone!
I've not quite worked out the finer details of how to approach this yet, but just thought i'd get things started.
I think you are right that it could get very confusing trying to have a general discussion, but the idea of that was to try and pull out some ideas to use in a more formal questionnaire. I should have this done and sent out over the next couple of days.
Thanks for the interest and i'll be in touch again soon!