The Contexts of Return Migration of Faculty Members in Tehran: A Qualitative Study

This paper seeks to identify the contexts and grounds affecting the repatriation migration of university professors to the country during the last ten years using the grounded Theory approach and indepth interviews. The study population comprise of the university faculty members who have had the expereince of return migration to Iran. The sampling was conducted using purposeful and snowballing until theoretical saturation. The findings showed that the causal factors affecting the return migration include economical factors (welfare problems in relation to their salary and high expenses of life abroad), social factors (the feeling of social injustice, the vague status of employment, the feeling of social despair and the lack of social capital) and personal and motivational factors (family belonging and the sensation to improve the scientific level of Iran). Apart from the above mentioned causal factors, the underlying factors of "psychological" (psychological problems and emotional belongings of the individual) as well as "job-scientific" factors (the possibility of employment and job repulsion), along with interventional factors such as "lack of financial capacity" as well as associated policies (immigration and occupational) play a role in the occurrence of this phenomenon, which indicates the multidimensionality and intertwining of structural, environmental and agent factors which inlfuence together the return migration.