ArticleFrontiers in sociology2026
Post-material values and brain drain: how value transformation shapes the migration mindset among highly educated South Asians?
Article in Frontiers in sociology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
While economic reasons are predominantly considered as drivers of brain drain in the existing literature, the present study demonstrates that migration decisions are substantially shaped by structural misalignments between individuals' value orientations and the institutional, cultural, and social environments of their home countries. Drawing on 25 in-depth interviews and a focus group discussion, the study integrates Bourdieu's theorisations of habitus, field, and taste with Inglehart's theory of post-material value shift to understand how higher education cultivates durable dispositions oriented toward personal autonomy, quality of life, social justice, and self-actualisation that home-country context structurally fails to accommodate. The analysis reveals that highly educated (potential) migrants constitute a latent social class, defined not by a conscious collective identity but by the objective homology of their capital compositions, shared habituses, and convergent migration trajectories. This latent class formation helps explain not only why migration persists beyond economic motivation, but also why diaspora engagement and transnational knowledge transfer remain limited among these immigrants: when migration resolves a deep incompatibility between habitus and social context rather than a temporary material deficit, the motivational conditions for sustained home-country engagement are fundamentally weakened. Existing return and diaspora policies in South Asia have largely failed in this context, because they often prioritise financial incentives while disregarding the value transformations that originally produced emigration. Therefore, the findings call for a reorientation of policy frameworks toward addressing the structural field conditions, including institutional trust, professional recognition, political openness, and quality-of-life infrastructure, that drive value-motivated human capital flight.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.