Health Assimilation of Second Generation Migrants: The Role of Parental Material and Social Resources

Silvia Loi, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Pekka Martikainen, Centre for Health Equity Studies
Heta Moustgaard, University of Helsinki
Mikko Myrskylä, London School of Economics and Political Science
Joonas Pitkänen, University of Helsinki

We aim at assessing the role of parental material and social resources in the health assimilation process across different generations of immigrant children. Health conditions of children of immigrants are widely recognized as an important dimension of successful integration. As such, the topic is of particular importance in Europe, a context of increasing in-migration flows. We draw on theoretical perspectives from the immigrant health assimilation research. We use high quality register data from Finland, free of reporting bias and loss to follow-up to study health assimilation on three different health outcomes: somatic conditions, psychopathological disorders and injuries in the period 1970-2012. Preliminary descriptive findings support our expectations: children of immigrants are undergoing a process of negative health assimilation, for all the considered health outcomes. The pattern is more pronounced for somatic and psychopathological disorders. Specific to psychopathological disorders, we observe that children living in exogamous families (one native and one migrant parent) have significantly higher prevalence of psychopathological disorders compared to other generations and to the native population. Our findings hold after stratifying for parental income and maternal age at birth. Further multivariate analyses will aim at disentangling the causes of these processes in more detail. We expect that further multivariate analyses will show that parental background, both as material and social resources will partly account for the observed differentials: drawing on previous results on health assimilation of children of migrants we expect that migrant children from disadvantaged families experience a faster negative health assimilation. Furthermore, we aim at analyzing the interaction effects of parental background and immigrant generation, as well as parental background and children’s own characteristics in early adulthood.

Presented in Session 18: Health, Morbidity, and Mortality Among International Migrants