The RISE Survey: Developing and Implementing a Valid and Reliable Quantitative Measure of Refugee Integration in the United States

Measuring integration in new countries of immigration

“…Many studies simply avoid using or proposing a definition of the term. Other studies mention the complex nature of the term, others cite its complex nature and wide use in both research and policy, thus explaining this lack of a common understanding of the term (Puma, Lichtenstein, and Stein 2018;Harder et al 2018;Bauböck and Tripkovic 2017).…”

“…The second refers to immigrant integration as the process through which immigrants come to the same status as the native-born (Schneider and Crul 2010;Messina and Williamson 2014;OECD/EU 2018;Aleksynska and Algan 2010;Jimenez 2011). However, these definitions spark many criticisms which can be resumed in the following 5 categories: i) they are too wide/ambiguous and leave space for interpretation; ii) they do not define the dimensions through which comparison with the native population should be done; iii) the fact that they are normative and assume that immigrants should assimilate into de destination country; iv) that to use the nation-state as a unit of analysis is problematic from a transnational perspective; v) or that the policy influences how integration is researched (Schneider and Crul 2010;Puma, Lichtenstein, and Stein 2018;Messina and Williamson 2014;Favell 2003;Loch 2014;Saharso 2019;Faist 2000;Klarenbeek 2019;Abdou 2019).…”

“…their connection with the host society), the economic dimension includes areas such as income and employment, the political dimension captures the political and civic participation, the social aspect seizes the social ties, the linguistic one measures the ability to use the local language, and the navigational one refers to the management of the basic needs in the host country. As in other studies, Harder and his colleagues use a number of indictors which together are clustered in a integration dimension (OECD/EU 2015, 2018Huddleston et al 2015;Harder et al 2018;Puma, Lichtenstein, and Stein 2018). Their 12 items scale is the short version and a 24 items scale is the long version, with 2 and respectively 4 indicators asked for each of the 6 areas of integration 3 ‡ .…”

“…In this research the validity of the proposed measure for immigrant integration will be tested using three independent variables: years of residency, if the respondents have higher education or not and the legal status; and two control variables: age and gender. In migration scholarship, the variables of age and gender, as with number of years of residency, legal status and education, are widely accepted as important control/mediating variables (OECD/EU 2018Huddleston, Niessen, and Tjaden 2013;Lichtenstein and Puma 2018;Puma, Lichtenstein, and Stein 2018).…”

“…Among them, the most pressing ones were about the pressure on social and educational services, the rise of far right and xenophobic social movements, the burden put on the destination countries which had previously little experience with immigrant integration, or the needs migrants have during the integration process. As some scholars have suggested, the study of immigrant integration has tried but partially failed to provide definitive answers to these questions due to, among other issues, the lack of common understanding and measure of immigrants' integration (Puma, Lichtenstein, and Stein 2018;Harder et al 2018;Bauböck and Tripkovic 2017).…”