Country-level Education Research Articles

Multicultural Integration Policy as an Explanatory Factor of Immigrant Social Belonging: Multilevel Evidence for a Multilevel Construct

Large-scale international assessments, like the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), are useful tools to help track social and educational outcomes. PISA is a test administered to students in the most developed and developing economies in the world such as Australia, Canada, EU countries, the USA as well as those like Brazil or China. PISA explicitly rates/ranks country-level education systems to inform policy development, which implicitly invokes a multilevel framework within an ecological framework. I provide multilevel, validity evidence of the unidimensionality of PISA’s social belonging measure with consideration for one’s immigration background in 36 countries. Then, I demonstrate that the multicultural policy context in host countries defines and effects the social belonging for students with a migration background. Results suggest that students with an immigration background experience decreased levels of social belonging in school when compared to native-born heritage students but that national-level policy can support these students. The novelty of including national-level policy as a part of the ecological framework of construct validation offers the measurement field an example of a more holistic evaluation of immigrant integration using psychological constructs. Much theoretical lip service has been said that policies and country-level characteristics are a part of a larger ecological model of item response and the validation process, but little research has actually been done. This research is the first to make the explicit connection between policy and immigrant outcomes in the context of measurement and validity showing how the policy context, in part, defines the construct of social belonging.

Unemployment and education mismatch in the EU before and after the financial crisis

This paper investigates whether general formal education still helps youth avoid situations of unemployment and inactivity in favour of other labour force statuses (dependent employment, self-employment, education) across EU countries over the period 2006–2010. In a second step, we analyse whether the relationship between education and the labour statuses above is affected by different degrees of country-level education mismatch. Our results show that after the outbreak of the crisis and in countries with high educational mismatch there is an additional reduction in unemployment risk for highly educated people that is accompanied by a higher probability of being an employee than of remaining in education.

Nursing professionalization and welfare state policies: A critical review of structural factors influencing the development of nursing and the nursing workforce

Nursing professionalization is both ongoing and global, being significant not only for the nursing workforce but also for patients and healthcare systems. For this reason, it is important to have an in-depth understanding of this process and the factors that could affect it. This literature review utilizes a welfare state approach to examine macrolevel structural determinants of nursing professionalization, addressing a previously identified gap in this literature, and synthesizes research on the relevance of studying nursing professionalization. The use of a welfare state framework facilitates the understanding that the wider social, economic, and political system exercises significant power over the distribution of resources in a society, providing a glimpse into the complex politics of health and health care. The findings shed light on structural factors outside of nursing, such as country-level education, health, labor market, and gender policies that could impact the process of professionalization and thus could be utilized to strengthen nursing through facilitating increased professionalization levels. Addressing gender inequalities and other structural determinants of nursing professionalization could contribute to achieving health equity and could benefit health systems through enhanced availability, skill-level, and sustainability of nursing human resources, improved and efficient access to care, improved patient outcomes, and cost savings.

School life expectancy and risk for tuberculosis in Europe.

This study aims to investigate the effect of country-level school life expectancy on Tuberculosis (TB) incidence to gain further understanding of substantial variation in TB incidence across Europe. An ecological study examined the prospective association between baseline country-level education in 2000 measured by school life expectancy and TB incidence in 2000-2010 in 40 countries of the WHO European region using quantile regression. Subsequently, to validate the ecological associations between education and TB incidence, an individual-level analysis was performed using case-based data in 29 EU/EEA countries from the European Surveillance System (TESSy) and simulating a theoretical control group. The ecological analysis showed that baseline school life expectancy had a negative prospective association with TB incidence. We observed consistent negative effects of school life expectancy on individuals' TB infections prospectively. These findings suggests that country-level education is an important determinant of individual-level TB infection in the region, and in the absence of a social determinants indicator that is routinely collected for reportable infectious diseases, the adoption of country-level education for reportable infectious diseases would significantly advance the field.

Education Mismatch, Human Capital and Labour Status of Young People Across European Union Countries

This paper analyses the influence of country-level education mismatch on the individual-level relationship between education and the probability of being unemployed or staying in alternative labour statuses. Young people aged 15–34 in 2006, 2008 and 2010, and living in 21 EU countries are considered. We assume that these young people may fall in five labour market statuses: 1) Employee; 2) Self-employed; 3) Unemployed; 4) In Education; 5) Inactive, and perform a multinomial logit model to study the effects of years of education on relative probability of being in labour statuses 2, 3, 4, or 5, compared to the base category (Employee). Afterwards, we interact the individual-level years of education with a country-level indicator of education mismatch in order to identify the heterogeneous effects of the aggregate mismatch among people with different educational attainments. Results show that more years of education: i) reduce the relative probability of being unemployed; ii) have a cumulative effect by extending the period of education; iii) slightly raise the relative probability to be self-employed. As regards country-level education mismatch, we found that only after 2008 it produces an additional effect on better educated young people by further reducing their relative unemployment risk when it is compared to that of low educated youngsters. This outcome tells us that improving access to university degrees remains the main road to tackle youth unemployment caused by education mismatch, even after the outburst of the current financial and economic crisis.