Subjective well‐being and school outcomes among children of immigrants and natives in Italy

Children of immigrants are generally disadvantaged in terms of educational outcomes in most European countries and this remains true even after controlling for their socio-economic status. Factors affecting the long-term educational careers among children of immigrants and natives have been broadly investigated in the literature, although limited attention has been paid so far to the role of subjective well-being in this context. In this paper we aim to fill this gap by analyzing how subjective well-being in the school and family context is related to objective school outcomes of immigrant and native children residing in Italy, after controlling for several relevant socio-demographic factors. We use rich and unique data from the “Integration of the Second Generation” survey carried out by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) in 2015, that has not been used to analyse this relationship so far. The national representative sample includes 68,127 students interviewed in both lower and upper secondary schools. Around 47% of them are immigrant children without Italian citizenship. Our results show that subjective well-being is positively correlated with school performance, but well-being at school is much more important for immigrant students’ achievements, as compared to their native peers, especially in the lower secondary school. The same result does not hold for well-being in the family domain.