Investigation of Socio-Economic Factors Affecting Elite Tendency to Emigrate Abroad

The study is to investigate the socio-economic factors affecting elite tendency to emigrate abroad. The research method is a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. In the qualitative section, 22 semi-structured interviews were conducted through purposeful sampling with the elite covered by the Elite Science Foundation in 2018. Interviews with inductive, open coding and open source code based on common-sense semantics and continuous sub-class comparisons, and subcategories and main categories were categorized. The results of this stage showed that the main factors and problems enumerated by the respondents about the tendency of elites to emigrate abroad are: scientific, social, cultural, economic, managerial, planning, legal and communication and technological infrastructure. In the quantitative section, with using survey method and questionnaire technique, required information is gathered. The sample size was estimated 183 by Cochran formula and then 200 people were surveyed by simple random sampling. In this study, the factors affecting elite migration were investigated based on the theory of Everett Lee and after regression analysis, it was observed that social and scientific factors (barriers) at the origin, scientific and social factors at the destination and intervening factors at the destination affect the tendency of elites to migrate abroad.