A way to study transnational identities

The contribution reflects upon a research about Italo-Argentinians, carried out adopting a mixed method approach in adigital context.Nowadays, migrations lay on transnational relationship-wise networks affecting both the destination and origincountries and populations, in a non-stop of interaction and mixture mechanism. In an era of geolocalization, migrantsdo not move from a place to another without leaving traces: they keep having multiple and different interrelations withtheir origin, transition, and arrival countries, but also with all the other physical and digital spaces they enter in contactwith.In this scenario, ICT ease the development of transnational relationships and contribute to the raising and strengtheningof the so- -Argentinians, for example, developed continuous interactions allowing themto build and re-build their own culture and their own hybrid identity.The research has been carried out through a digital ethnography providing the opportunity to observe the interactionsamong subjects identifying themselves as Italo-Argentinians: they were able to build a suitable environment, wherefollowing the links likely to be significant.Ethnographic method has been integrated with a web survey, allowing to deepen arguments and to develop an egonetwork analysis with the software Egonet, useful to understand the social networks importance in defining the culturaland identity belonging.To verify one of the starting hypothesis, namely the influence of close ties on the identity of the Italo-Argentinians, wecollected 119 self-administrated questionnaires. The survey identified the strong ties, the main relationships buildingthe subject's first reference horizon. It asked to rank persons according to the degree of intimacy, also asking thecategory of belonging, nationality, means of communication, and the frequency of that contact. Nationality andcompactness of the network proved to be important in building the transnational identity of the subjects.The visualization of the ego-centered maps helped us to more intuitively show what were the relationship influencingthe subjects interviewed. In particular, the graphic approach allowed to directly compare the networks of differentindividuals, in search of a significant similarity.