Long-Term Effects of Language Course Timing on Language Acquisition and Social Contacts: Turkish and Moroccan Immigrants in Western Europe

Abstract

This article investigates long‐term effects of the timing of language course participation among immigrants, focusing on self‐assessed immigration country language skills and interethnic social contacts among immigrants from Turkey and Morocco who came to Western Europe mainly during the guest worker period. Data stem from the 2008 Six Country Immigrant Integration Comparative Survey. We find a positive, long‐term impact of course participation in the first four years after immigration on language skills and social contacts. Results support linguistic theories on the benefits of early language instruction and sociopsychological theories on long‐term effects of (even short) social belonging interventions on participants' perseverance in achieving educational success.

The Effect of Length of Residence and Geographical Origin on the Social Inclusion of Immigrants

“…A very positive step would be to develop programs in different settings (e.g. neighbourhoods, schools) to strengthen inter-ethnic support networks and systematize the participation of immigrants in Spanish language courses in the first 4 years of migration given the long-term positive impact of language skills, cultural competence, development of social ties, and social integration itself (Geurts & Lubbers, 2017;Hoehne & Michalowski, 2016). The benefits of intervention programs have also been shown to improve resilience among immigrants in the first phase of migration and that their positive effects are both visible in the short term and can persist over time (Yu, Lam, Liu, & Stewart, 2015).…”

Conceptualizing and Measuring Citizenship and Integration Policy

“…These problems of index construction directly affect hypothesis testing and inference, whereby what scholars “know” about the causes and consequences of immigration and citizenship policy are vulnerable to these measurements and their flaws. For example, there is a lack of consensus in the literature over the question of whether integration policies help (Hoehne & Michalowski, 2015; Wright & Bloemraad, 2012), hinder (Koopmans, 2010), or having a limited effect (Ersanilli & Koopmans, 2010; Goodman & Wright, 2015) on immigrant integration outcomes. These conflicting understandings are sustained by problems of concept validity and measurement.…”

Performance simulations for categorical mediation: Analyzing khb estimates of mediation in ordinal regression models

“…Here we examine the performance of the mediation technique for ordinal logistic regression models (McKelvey and Zavoina 1975; Winship and Mare 1983; Fullerton 2009; McCullagh 1980), using a comprehensive set of conditions. The technique has been used for mediation analysis in ordinal regression models across several disciplines such as sociology (for example, Stearns, Jha, and Potochnick [2013]; Monnat and Chandler [2015]; Mair et al [2016]), political science (for example, Ennser-Jedenastik [2017]), demography (for example, Hoehne and Michalowski [2016]), psychology (for example, Guloksuz et al [2015]), and public health (for example, Attanasio et al [2017]). Given the widespread popularity of ordinal logistic regression, it is critical to understand how well performs in mediated ordinal logistic regression models.…”