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Life Satisfaction Among Recent Immigrants in Canada: Comparisons to Source-Country and Host-Country Populations

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Abstract

Research examining how changes in life circumstances affect subjective well-being has been dominated by set-point theory. New evidence challenges the assumptions of this theory, indicating that major life events can result in lasting changes to individuals’ life satisfaction. This study examines whether changes in national-level conditions following migration affect the life satisfaction of immigrant groups from different source countries by comparing the average life satisfaction levels of immigrant groups to that of non-emigrants in their source countries. Life satisfaction differences between immigrant groups and the native-born population in Canada are also examined. Results show that migration to a country with improved national-level conditions increases immigrants’ life satisfaction. Most immigrant groups had higher life satisfaction than their source-country counterparts and life satisfaction scores were similar to those of the native-born population. These findings persist when the sample includes immigrants who have resided in Canada for up to 20 years.

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Notes

  1. Subjective well-being is a general term used to refer to a range of assessments of life satisfaction (Diener et al. 2010). "Happiness" is often used synonymously with life satisfaction and the two terms are typically employed in subjective well-being survey questions (Selezneva 2011). The literature identifies two aspects of individuals’ assessments of "happiness", distinguishing cognitive evaluations of their life as a whole from emotional states or moods such as joy or anger (Diener et al. 1997). Measures of life satisfaction employed in this study specifically refer to individuals’ assessments of life "as a whole", representing the cognitive evaluation of individuals’ satisfaction with their life overall. The review of literature for this paper draws on studies that refer to happiness, life satisfaction, and subjective well-being.

  2. To test whether limiting our sample to immigrant groups with higher numbers of respondents produces different results, two sensitivity tests were conducted for the regression model presented in Table 2 (available upon request). The model was first run for immigrant groups with at least 40 observations, followed by a second test for immigrant groups with at least 50 observations. These alternative models produced the same conclusions as those based on immigrants with at least 20 observations; that is, source-country GDP per capita was negatively and significantly associated with our dependent variable—the differences in life satisfaction between recent immigrants and their source-country populations.

  3. El Salvador has WVS data only from Wave 3. Algeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Zimbabwe have WVS data only from Wave 4. Ethiopia, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Netherlands, Trinidad and Tobago have WVS data only from Wave 5. Venezuela, the United Kingdom and Poland participated in two WVS waves, but data from only one wave were used in this study. The Wave 4 Venezuela survey did not contain self-reported health; the Polish survey did not include employment status; and the Wave 3 UK survey did not contain self-reported health. Because these variables are needed as demographic controls, these data were not included in the analyses.

  4. To examine the potential impact of the slightly different wording in the WVS and Canadian surveys, mean reported life satisfaction in the 2006 WVS for Canada (a sample size of 2157) was compared with the 2005 and 2006 GSS (each with a sample size of about 20,000). The average life satisfaction score for Canada in the 2006 WVS was 7.76, 0.03 points (p = 0.130) higher than in the 2005 GSS and 0.21 points (p < 0.001) lower than the level in the 2006 GSS. These differences barely change when differences in age, sex, education, employment status, and geographic distribution are controlled. By comparison, in ten Canadian household surveys conducted from 2003 to 2011 that used the same question, average life satisfaction scores ranged from 7.60 to 8.31, and no clear trend emerged (Bonikowska et al. 2013).Therefore, differences in reported life satisfaction are greater among the Canadian surveys than the difference between the WVS and the Canadian surveys. The difference between the WVS and Canadian surveys in average life satisfaction is also small relative to what is observed between immigrants in Canada and their source-country populations (Table 1).

  5. In the WVS, the scale is very poor, poor, fair, good, and very good; in the Canadian surveys, the scale is poor, fair, good, very good, and excellent. In the converted four-point scale, very poor and poor are combined as "poor" in the WVS, and very good and excellent are combined as "very good" in the Canadian surveys. Including the converted general health measure as a control variable in multivariate regression models results in a slightly higher adjusted level of life satisfaction for populations in source countries than when the original general health measure is used. However, using the converted or original health measure does not alter general conclusions about the higher average life satisfaction among immigrants than among the source-country populations and the correlates of the differences.

  6. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD/countries?display=default, downloaded in February 2013.

  7. The civil liberty scale represents freedom of expression, assembly, association, education and religion. Civil liberty data were downloaded from http://www.freedomhouse.org/ in February 2013.

  8. Based on the 1998–2008 average, using data provided by Ronald Inglehart at the University of Michigan. The traditional/secular-rational scale reflects the importance of religion, traditional family values and deference to authority. The survival/self-expression scale reflects the transition from industrial societies to post-industrial societies and the accompanying shift in importance from economic and physical security toward subjective well-being, self-expression and quality of life.

  9. These additional country-level characteristics were obtained from the World Bank database (2005–2008 averages).

  10. Note that only 3 of the 43 source countries examined have higher GDP (PPP) per capita than Canada (United States, Hong Kong, and the Netherlands). In addition, Canada is assigned the highest score on the civil liberties index, indicating a high level of freedoms (Freedom House 2013). The majority of source countries examined (35 of 43) had lower levels of civil liberty than Canada.

  11. Household income is coded as six categories rather than as an interval variable because substantial percentages of respondents reported their household income in broad ranges instead of exact dollar amounts or did not report their household income. The income categories are lowest (<$30,000), lower-middle ($30,000–$59,999), middle ($60,000–$99,999), higher-middle ($100,000–$149,999), high ($150,000 or more), and missing. Because the household income categories do not take the economies of scale associated with family size into account, household size (square root) was included to control for the reduced consumption needs of additional members. The geographic controls are six geographic regions and seven groups of urban/rural areas.

  12. After controlling for socio-demographic characteristics, the number of immigrant-source country pairings with a difference in average life satisfaction of 0.5 or greater declines from 38 to 31 (of the 43 overall), while the number for which the life satisfaction difference is 0.4 or greater declines from 39 to 35.

  13. If this is the case, one would also expect life satisfaction scores to converge as immigrant groups reside in Canada for longer periods of time. However, this cannot be tested with our pooled cross-sectional data as it is not possible to distinguish cohort differences from assimilation effects. For example, factors affecting the migration decisions of immigrants from Hong Kong who had resided in Canada for 11–20 years in our data would differ greatly from those of their counterparts who had arrived within 10 years.

  14. In a separate multivariate model, about one-quarter of the variation in life satisfaction across source countries is accounted for by GDP per capita; the effect of civil liberty is not significant when GDP per capita is taken into account. Again, this suggests that immigrants from countries with lower levels of economic development experience greater improvements in life satisfaction after migration.

  15. In Model 1 (no controls), the coefficient for immigrant status is −0.21 (p < 0.001); in Model 2 (sex, age, age squared, marital status, education, employment status, self-assessed health, and geographic distribution included in the model) the coefficient is −0.28 (p < 0.001); in Model 3 (household income, household size, home ownership and detailed geographic regions added to the model) the coefficient for immigrant status is −0.12 (p < 0.001).

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Frank, K., Hou, F. & Schellenberg, G. Life Satisfaction Among Recent Immigrants in Canada: Comparisons to Source-Country and Host-Country Populations. J Happiness Stud 17, 1659–1680 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-015-9664-2

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