Immigrants’ Subjective Integration: Life Satisfaction Among Immigrants in Italy

Research has recently pointed out that to understand immigrant integration is not sufficient to investigate only its ‘objective’ forms. Instead, one must also study ‘subjective’ integration, using immigrants’ self-reported life satisfaction in order to take into account immigrants’ perceptions and opinions. Life satisfaction has been defined as “a global assessment of a person’s quality of life according to his chosen criteria”. Due to its common use in estimating the “apparent quality of life within a country or a specific social group”, immigrants’ self-reported life satisfaction can be used to evaluate the integration process into the residence country. This paper aims to add to this research strand, measuring the effect of demographic, human capital and ‘immigration’ variables on the self-reported life satisfaction of young and adult immigrants residing in Italy, performing a stepwise ordered logistic regression. Data stem from the Survey on Social Condition and Integration of Migrants in Italy (Condizione e Integrazione Sociale dei Cittadini Stranieri) carried out by Italian Statistical Institute (ISTAT) in 2011-2012. The total sample is 25,326 individuals including first and second generation immigrants. The survey addresses the following topics: employment; languages; civic and political participation; family reunion; long-term residence and citizenship, health, education, discrimination, social network, relation with the country of origin. To pursue our research aim, we subset our sample to individuals aged 14 years and over, foreign born and foreign born naturalized Italian. The total new sample is 15,709. We perform a stepwise ordered logistic regression. We will use the following variables in the analysis.