Social Integration of Second Generation Students in the Italian School System

Cultural divides and prejudices complicate the processes of integration and acculturation of migrant families living in a foreign country. Evaluating the impact of such phenomenon can be crucial for social stability and policy making. In this context, the education system has a leading role in fostering and attaining social integration, in particular when it comes to younger sections of the migrant population. In this work, we propose a method for the construction of a quantitative indicator capturing social integration of second generation students in the Italian school system according to areas dened by nationality of the students and administrative region in which they attend school. The indicator, based on survey data, is estimated following a 2-step methodology. In the rst step, following alternatively a proxy variable approach or a Latent variable model approach, we choose an individual qualitative variable capturing social integration at the unit level and we compute a rst raw estimate of the indicator as the proportion of highly integrated students in each area. In the second step, we make use of two alternative small area models to improve the estimates, dealing with missing values, low sample size in smaller domains and high variability. At the end, the 2-step methodology results in 4 alternative versions of a synthetic indicator of social integration, that can be used to rank nationalities and administrative regions.