Subjective Well-Being, Transnational Families and Social Integration of Married Immigrants in Italy

Abstract

International literature has shown that demographic characteristics, socioeconomic status, social ties and supports in the host country play an important role on migrants’ subjective wellbeing. The influence of such characteristics has been widely studied so far, especially on immigrants’ levels of life satisfaction, but how living transnational partnerships and parenthoods might affect the subjective wellbeing of migrants and how this situation might be reflecting social integration issues still remains poorly understood. This paper is aimed at covering this gap by analyzing each one of the components of subjective well-being: own assessment of life satisfaction (cognitive component), feelings of loneliness (emotional component) and sense of belonging (affective component). Ordinal logistic regressions were run on a selected sample of the Survey on Social Conditions and Integration of Foreign citizens carried out by ISTAT in 2011/2012. Results have shown that living in transnational families differently affect subjective wellbeing, being particularly important for the cognitive and emotional components among married immigrants. Self-perceived social integration has been found to be a protective factor of immigrants’ levels of subjective wellbeing, having a preventive role on their levels of life satisfaction and feelings of loneliness.