Abstract
Beyond formal education, continuing adult learning and education (ALE) is considered as successful means for supporting immigrants’ integration into the receiving society. Although recently, subjective parameters of immigrants’ integration (e.g., life satisfaction) have received increasing academic attention, research on the impact of education on subjective integration indicators is still rare. To address this, the present study contributes to the literature by investigating the effect of ALE participation on life satisfaction in a longitudinal design. The study compares the effect for the group of immigrants with the group of natives in order to estimate whether the potential education effect on life satisfaction is equally strong for both groups or stronger for the group of immigrants (interaction effect). For this, the study uses seven waves of panel data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) with N = 6386 individuals, of which N = 1002 individuals have a migration background. Methodologically, a Random Intercepts Cross-Lagged Panel Model is applied. This allows distinguishing within-person fluctuations from trait-like between-person differences. On the between-person level, we find a significant link between ALE participation and life satisfaction for both immigrants and natives. However, on the within-person level, no significant cross-lagged effects are observed. Moreover, we find no support for an immigrant-native gap in life satisfaction.
Highlights
Increasing population proportions of people with migration background in European societies underpin the relevance of integration as a key policy goal (Ager and Strang 2008; OECD 2019), making it important to identify the conditions of integration (Kogan et al 2018)
The level of subjective well-being (SWB) is found to be lower among immigrants compared to non-immigrants (Bartram 2010; Hendriks 2015; Safi 2010; Sand and Gruber 2018) and does not increase with the length of their stay in the receiving country (Amit 2010; Hendriks and Burger 2019), scholars argue for immigrants’ SWB to be a significant indicator for integration: Immigrants who are more integrated are happier compared to less integrated immigrants (Hendriks 2015; Virta et al 2004); higher integration was associated with higher life satisfaction of immigrants (Angelini et al 2015)
Given that the variables entered in the RI-CLPM (i.e., ALE participation and life satisfaction) were not normally distributed, the model was estimated by robust maximum likelihood (MLR)
Summary
Increasing population proportions of people with migration background in European societies underpin the relevance of integration as a key policy goal (Ager and Strang 2008; OECD 2019), making it important to identify the conditions of integration (Kogan et al 2018). The level of subjective well-being (SWB) is found to be lower among immigrants compared to non-immigrants (Bartram 2010; Hendriks 2015; Safi 2010; Sand and Gruber 2018) and does not increase with the length of their stay in the receiving country (Amit 2010; Hendriks and Burger 2019), scholars argue for immigrants’ SWB to be a significant indicator for integration: Immigrants who are more integrated are happier compared to less integrated immigrants (Hendriks 2015; Virta et al 2004); higher (subjective) integration was associated with higher life satisfaction of immigrants (Angelini et al 2015). With SWB being an indicator for individual integration (Tegegne and Glanville 2018; Paparusso 2019), examining the integration-related conditions of immigrants’ SWB and the sources promoting their life satisfaction constitutes a promising way for identifying mechanisms and determinants that promote or hinder integration
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