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Immigration Status and Adolescent Life Satisfaction: An International Comparative Analysis Based on PISA 2015

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Abstract

In the prevailing international migration flows and the emerging trend of pursuing happiness rather than material wealth, researchers’ attention has been increasingly directed towards the life satisfaction of immigrant adolescents. Using a sample of 344,438 adolescents aged 15 years old from 49 countries/economies who participated in the 2015 wave of the programme of international student assessment, this study provides a comprehensive discussion of the relationship between immigrant status and adolescent life satisfaction (ALS). By performing a multiple linear regression analysis of each economy, this paper demonstrates the mixed effect of immigration status on ALS. By performing hierarchal linear modelling based on the pooled sample, this study asserts that although immigrant adolescents experience significantly lower life satisfaction than their native counterparts, this gap can be substantially reduced by certain school and family factors. Furthermore, with the application of propensity score matching to 13 economies with higher proportions of immigrant adolescents, this study contributes to the critical debate on the immigrant paradox by grouping and comparing the ALS gaps across generations.

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Notes

  1. These five instruments include the Student Life Satisfaction Scale, the one-item Overall Life Satisfaction, the Personal Well-being Index—School Children, the Brief Multidimensional Student Life Satisfaction Scale, and Russell’s Core Affect scale.

  2. The full list is Albania, Algeria, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Georgia, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Lebanon, Malta, Moldova, New Zealand, Norway, Romania, Singapore, Vietnam, Sweden, Trinidad, Tobago, FYROM, and Argentina (Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos).

  3. The full list is Italy, Puerto Rico (USA), USA (Massachusetts), and USA (North Carolina).

  4. The following two suggestions are offered in the PISA 2015 official documents for using this scale: (a) the first two items should be excluded in international comparison studies due to certain measurement issues, and (b) the original 4 points of the remaining six items should be recoded into 3 points because both (c) a few times a month and (d) once a week or more can be interpreted as high frequency and should be combined into the same category.

  5. As summarized in a systematic review published by Elwert and Winship (2014), conditioning on the intervening variable between treatment and outcome could block the causal path and consequently induce overcontrol bias. In the case of our study, the variable ‘bullying’ is such a suspect due to its considerably high correlations with both immigration status and ALS (see Table 3). Thus, excluding bullying from the PSM is ideal. Furthermore, an in-depth analysis on the relations between immigration status, bullying and ALS might rely on exploring the potential mediating mechanism, since being an immigrant could influence the likelihood of being bullied, which would then influence ALS. Future research can expand in this direction through the technique of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) (Shrier and Platt 2008). We thank the anonymous reviewers for highlighting this critical issue and the editor for kindly providing the literature.

  6. This indicator is computed using the following formula: \(\left({b_{1,step i + 1} - b_{1,step i}} \right)/b_{1,step 1},\, i = 2, \ldots,5\).

  7. The following three tests were performed to diagnose the balance: likelihood-ratio (LR) test, Rubin’s B test, and Rubin’s R test. First, none of the LR test results were found to be significant after matching, demonstrating the joint lack of significance of all control variables. Second, almost all results of Rubin’s B test were under 25% (with two exceptions in the German sample), demonstrating the high homogeneity of the matched groups. Third, all results of Rubin’s R test were in the interval [0, 2], demonstrating the high homogeneity of the matched groups. The detailed results are available upon request.

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  1. School of Education, Capital Normal University, Beijing, 100037, China

    Yipeng Tang

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Tang, Y. Immigration Status and Adolescent Life Satisfaction: An International Comparative Analysis Based on PISA 2015. J Happiness Stud 20, 1499–1518 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-018-0010-3

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