Children of Immigrants in Lower Secondary Education: Reasons and Consequences of School Retardation

In Italy, foreign boys and girls are often enrolled in classes at a lower grade compared to their age, mainly because of language problems. In their education pathway they also encounter more difficulties than their Italian schoolmates, as the smaller number of passing students show. This brings about a widespread school retardation, which grows as the education levels increase. In the school year 2006/07 slightly less than 25% of foreign students enrolled in primary school, 50% in lower secondary and almost 75% in upper secondary lag behind, with a growing share of those with more than one year’s delay among older ones. The present paper aims at identifying the causes of the retardation and checking whether it affects the perception of one's performance and the level of future educational aspirations using data from a national survey (ITAGEN2) involving more than 20,000 lower secondary school students, half of whom foreigners

Sex differences in mortality in migrants and the Swedish-born population: is there a double survival advantage for immigrant women?

Objectives: In the present study, we examine whether the relationships between country of origin or reason for migration and mortality differ between men and women. Methods: We apply hazard regression models on high-quality Swedish register data with nationwide coverage. Results: Relative to their Swedish counterparts, migrants from Nordic and East European (EU) countries and former Yugoslavia have higher mortality. This excess mortality among migrants relative to Swedes is more pronounced in men than in women. Migrants from Western and Southern European countries; Iran, Iraq, and Turkey; Central and South America; and Asia, have lower mortality than Swedes, and the size of the mortality reduction is similar in both sexes. The predictive effects of the reason for migration for mortality are also similar in migrant men and women. Conclusions: This study provides little support for the hypothesis of a double survival advantage among immigrant women in Sweden. However, it does show that the excess mortality in migrants from Nordic and EU countries and former Yugoslavia relative to the Swedish-born population is more pronounced in men than in women

Dai dati all'informazione. Strumenti per l'analisi secondaria

.Il volume intende offrire strumenti e chiarire percorsi di analisi secondaria a tutti coloro che intendano utilizzare le statistiche come base empirica su cui fondare le loro argomentazioni. A tal fine, nel primo capitolo del volume viene presentata una panoramica delle fonti statistiche ufficiali nazionali e di alcuni prodotti di maggiore rilevanza per le analisi socio-economiche e culturali: i tre censimenti più noti e alcune indagini campionarie sulle famiglie e sulle imprese italiane compiute dall’Istat. Per ciascuna di queste rilevazioni vengono presentate sia le caratteristiche metodologiche che i contenuti informativi, allo scopo di chiarire ed evidenziare il nesso tra il senso attribuibile ai dati e le loro modalità di produzione. Il secondo capitolo, focalizzandosi sulla transizione tra produzione e fruizione, si sofferma sul concetto multidimensionale di qualità e sui diversi tipi di dati di cui l’utilizzatore può disporre: meta, macro e micro. Viene ribadita la rilevanza dei metadati forniti dalle fonti, considerati informazioni irrinunciabili per una corretta attribuzione di significato alle statistiche e viene chiarita la differenza tra macrodati e microdati specie in termini di gradi di libertà per l’utilizzatore nella scelta di percorsi autonomi di analisi secondaria. Vengono inoltre affrontate alcune problematiche che si presentano spesso nella fruizione con particolare riferimento all’accesso e alla comparabilità dei dati . Nel terzo capitolo, incentrato sul momento della fruizione, viene esplicitato il percorso logico ed operativo che trasforma le statistiche in referenti empirici di concetti, e dunque in indicatori di fenomeni non direttamente osservabili e rilevabili, quando esse vengono utilizzate in analisi e per scopi differenti da quelli per i quali sono stati prodotti. Nella seconda parte del lavoro, dal quarto al settimo capitolo vengono affrontate alcune problematiche della metodologia più propriamente statistica che soggiace all’uso ed alla costruzione degli indicatori, sia semplici che compositi. Nella terza parte del volume , dal capitolo ottavo al decimo, viene presentato l’approccio multidimensionale ai dati, organizzati sotto forma di matrice. L’immensa mole di informazioni, raccolta in grandissimi collettivi, di unità statistiche, richiede di essere semplificata e sintetizzata per estrarne gi aspetti più rilevanti su cui basare l’analisi: si tratterà di diversi metodi di sintesi multidimensionale delle variabili e delle unità, adatti a variabili qualitative e quantitative. L’ultima parte propone alcuni esempi di analisi secondaria riferiti a temi diversi: la pratica sportiva, il divario digitale e la qualità della vita . Nei casi di studio proposti vengono utilizzati macrodati e microdati, costruiti indicatori semplici e compositi, applicati metodi di sintesi differenti. L’intento è quello di esemplificare i processi di costruzione e di trasformazione degli indicatori, a partire da dati prodotti dalle fonti statistiche, mettendo in pratica le indicazioni emerse nelle prime parti del volume

Short-term reproductive behaviour of foreign women who became mothers between 2002-2006 in Italy

The rapid increase in the number of foreigners in Italy has raised public interest in their demographic behaviour. In 2001-2007 the annual number of births to at least one foreign parent has more than doubled, from about 41,000 to more than 86,000. The main objective of this study is to give an overview of the demographic characteristics of foreign mothers in Italy. We investigate the risk of having another birth for women who became mothers between 2002 and 2006. The new approach in this study is the application of a deterministic record linkage to Italian administrative data on births, which allows a longitudinal analysis of birth histories. The results show that citizenship remains one of the most important factors in explaining the high heterogeneity in the reproductive behaviour among the mothers. The possibility of an ‘assimilative behaviour’ to fertility patterns of native Italians increases for mothers whose partner is Italian

Having children in Italy for foreign women: From the construction of new longitudinal data to the analysis of behavior in a short term period

The official sample surveys are not generally representative for foreigners, which increased the demand for reliable administrative records as sources of statistical information on migrants, especially if the focus is on demographic behaviors. To overcome the limits of existing data and to give proper importance to the information from administrative sources we have implemented a record linkage between of different datasets and of different years. Our main interest is to link the fertility behaviors of women with their migration history. Hence, we will focus on the Survey on Live Births of the Italian resident population and on information from the residence permits of the Italian Ministry of the Interior. The main novelty of this work is the use of stock and flow data from administrative registers to construct a longitudinal dataset that includes information on births and migrations in a determinate interval of years. This information was missing until now in the Italian context. The possibility of recovering information allows us to analyze the risk of having one or more children in the period considering also the migration history

Constructing New Demographic Dataset for Foreigners in Italy: Record linkage on Administrative Sources

Since the last census in 2001 the number of foreigners in Italy has increased rapidly: today they represent almost 7.2% of the total population. How much information do we have about them? How do they behave? What are their characteristics ? We used data from the Survey on Live Births of the resident population and from the Residence permits of the Ministry of the Interior in Italy. We used record linkage techniques to identify the same individual in different databases using common characteristics and the information available in the single files. The main novelty of this work is the use of stock data from administrative registers to construct a longitudinal dataset that includes information on births and migrations in a determinate period. The aim is to show problems, strategies and results of the record linkage procedures and possible applications of the new dataset

Il comportamento riproduttivo e le strategie migratorie degli stranieri presenti in Lombardia

The aim of the paper is to study fertility of foreign women in Lombardy and its interrelation with their preceding migration to Italy. The results show a strong impact of age at the migration and heterogeneous behaviour by citizenship in the reproductive choice