Un indicatore sintetico dell’integrazione scolastica e sociale delle seconde generazioni in Italia

Recent literature shows that one of the most important tools to pursue social inclusion and placement of immigrants in modern societies is educational integration. Aim of this paper is to provide synthetic measures of four different domains of such an integration referring to migrant students. Data stems from the Integration of the second generation survey (Istat, 2015), and the selected sub-sample refers to 31,687 migrant students attending lower and upper secondary schools. Students’ opinions on several features of their everyday life and school habits are collected through question items to be answered using ordinal scales. In particular, the present study focuses on the following domains: relationships with classmates; individual study habits and practices; relationships with teachers; students’ family attitudes towards education and school system. Relying on the CUB models framework, the analysis of the different domains is carried out by means of synthetic measures of self-assessed integration, taking into account both the perception of the latent trait of interest and the inherent heterogeneity within the response patterns. While standard (additive) approaches in building indicators may neglect a heterogeneity component, when present, the implemented Composite Indicator CUB (CI-CUB) methodology displays that an intrinsic uncertainty component, likely to be ascribed to respondents’ diverse backgrounds, does occur in our case study, being also not a negligible feature for most of the considered items.