Measuring Immigrants' Integration

This thesis seeks to deepen the understanding of immigrants’ integration. It consists of three interrelated studies. Each study assesses a distinct problem of quantitatively measuring immigrants’ integration and presents advanced measurement instruments and their implications for substantive results. Chapter 2 expounds the problems of quantitatively researching immigrants’ transnational mobility. The study applies factor mixture analyses (FMA) to the data of the Socio-economic panel study (GSOEP) and four indicators regarding frequency, length, and total duration of visits to the country of origin. The findings indicate that the commonly applied indicator of return visits largely fails to assess transnational mobility. Chapter 3 disentangles the interrelation between immigrants’ socioeconomic status and interethnic ties, while accounting for problems of measurement error by utilizing latent constructs. Social capital theory predicts a positive effect of interethnic ties on socioeconomic status, while due to social homophily a reverse causality might apply as well. The study applies fixed effects panel regressions and autoregressive cross-lagged panel models to GSOEP data of Italian, Turkish and former Yugoslavian immigrants in Germany. After accounting for simultaneity, reverse causality and unobserved heterogeneity, only a significant positive effect of interethnic ties on socioeconomic status remains. Hence, the results support social capital theory. Chapter 4 focuses on the deficiencies of existing quantitative measurements of immigrants’ national identification in a developmental mixed method design. The study applies exploratory factor analyses to GSOEP data and 54 qualitative interviews in order to ensure the reliability of the qualitative data. Subsequently it explores the predictors of immigrants’ identity formation by conducting a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). The results indicate that an absence of discrimination is most important for identifying with Germany. Further, the predictors explaining the two dimensions of national identification differ considerably. Thus, as quantitative single-method studies commonly survey immigrants’ ethnic and national identities with reference to different dimensions, their results are most likely biased. Chapter 5 presents two general challenges for future research and embeds the substantive results into existing theoretical and empirical research. The last chapter presents this dissertation’s limitations and ends with an overall conclusion