Eco&Stat n°06-2026 - What explains the well-being differences between immigrant and native adolescents around the world? A specification curve analysis

Executive Summary

Immigrant adolescents tend to experience less life satisfaction compared to their native peers. This gap is worrying beyond equity concerns alone. Gaps can exacerbate challenges of both assimilation and adolescence and carry long-term negative consequences, especially as adolescence is a critical period for psychological and social development.

However, immigrant adolescents are not always worse off according to new research from STATEC Research. In some countries, they are more satisfied than natives. This finding is somewhat surprising as immigrant adolescents generally experience greater challenges – e.g., bullying and lower socio-economic status.

Kelsey J. O’Connor and Fengyu Wu of STATEC Research, together with Martijn Hendriks at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Jose Marquez at the University of Manchester, examine the gap in immigrant-native adolescents life satisfaction using data for more than 750,000 15-year-old students across 42 countries from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

They find an average gap across countries of 0.31 life satisfaction points on a 0 to 10 scale, which is quite sizable – about half the size of the gap typically experienced by unemployed adults. In Luxembourg the gap is about two thirds of the average; there, immigrant adolescents report 0.20 life satisfaction points less than their native peers.

The authors find country-characteristics matter a great deal – explaining more than 60 percent of the variation in gaps around the world. Culture especially matters. Immigrant adolescents report the highest life satisfaction relative to natives in countries that are more “Uncertainty Avoidant”. Uncertainty Avoidance is one of six cultural dimensions articulated by the renowned late social-psychologist Geert Hofstede; countries that score high prefer formalized rules and contracts. This result is not surprising, as it is plausible that immigrants are better able to assimilate in countries with more formalization compared to unwritten social norms.

Institutional quality also matters, as immigrants fare worse under lower-quality governance, while larger or more diverse immigrant populations are somewhat surprisingly associated with wider gaps. Economic indicators – including GDP per capita, GDP growth, income inequality, and the unemployment rate – explain unexpectedly little. Public health expenditures, globalization, and migration integration policies likewise do not explain the gaps.

This new research indicates national context shapes the experiences of immigrant adolescents beyond individual or school-level conditions. And more than economic conditions or even migration integration policies, culture matters. Governments aiming to reduce immigrant–native well-being inequalities need to understand their cultural contexts in order to develop the best policies.