Researchers analyze immigrant adolescent well-being gap across 42 countries using PISA data; Smaller gap in uncertainty-avoidant, long-term cultures.
Eco&Stat n°06-2026 - Qu’est-ce qui explique les différences de bien-être entre les adolescents issus de l’immigration et les adolescents nés dans le pays à travers le monde ? Une analyse par courbes de spécification
N°147 08/2026 What explains the well-being differences between immigrant and native adolescents around the world? A specification curve analysis. Économie & Statistiques Working papers Auteurs : Kelsey J. O’Connor, Martijn Hendriks, Jose Marquez, and Fengyu Wu. Abstract Many countries are facing a crisis of declining adolescent well-being, and immigrant adolescents tend to fare even worse than their native peers. Yet, little is known about how country-level factors shape the immigrant-native gap in adolescent subjective well-being (SWB). Using data from more than 750,000 15-year-old students across 42 countries from the 2015, 2018, and 2022 waves of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), we explore this immigrant-native gap and examine its country-level determinants. Immigrant adolescents report 0.31 points lower life satisfaction (on a 0-10 scale) than their native peers; however, this gap varies widely across countries, ranging from a positive 0.23 (where immigrants are more satisfied) to a negative 0.83. Our main contribution is to examine this cross-national variation. Using specification-curve analyses, we show that country-level differences in the immigrant–native SWB gap are systematically related to macro- level factors. The SWB disadvantage of immigrant adolescents is smaller in cultures characterized by uncertainty avoidance and a long-term orientation, but larger in countries with larger and more diverse immigrant populations. While less robust, institutional quality and individualistic culture also correlate with a smaller SWB disadvantage among immigrant adolescents. These findings highlight the importance of national contexts, especially culture and demographic structure, in shaping SWB inequalities between immigrant and native adolescents. Keywords: subjective well-being, inequality, immigration, adolescence, PISA, culture O’Connor: Senior Researcher, STATEC Research (National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies); GLO Fellow, Global Labor Organization (GLO); Research Fellow, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA); 12 Boulevard Du Jazz, 4370 Esch-Belval Sanem, Luxembourg. Phone: +352 247 84351. Email: Kelsey.OConnor@statec.etat.lu. ORCID: 0000-0002-1413-3619. Hendriks: Deputy Director, Erasmus University Rotterdam; Associate Professor, University of Johannesburg. hendriks@ese.eur.nl. Marquez: Research Fellow, Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester; Research Associate, Wellbeing Research Centre, University of Oxford. Email: jose.marquez@manchester.ac.uk. Wu: Researcher, STATEC Research (National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies); GLO Fellow, Global Labor Organization (GLO); fengyu.wu@statec.etat.lu. The authors would like to thank Milena Nikolova and Carol Graham for helpful comments on an earlier draft. O’Connor and Wu gratefully acknowledge the financial support of STATEC. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not reflect those of STATEC, Erasmus University Rotterdam, University of Johannesburg, University of Manchester, University of Oxford, GLO, or IZA. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. The authors declare they have no competing interests.
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