Suchergebnisse

By drawing data from the European Social Survey (ESS) (2008–2016), this study explores how immigrants' assessments of economy, democracy, and quality of public goods (such as health and education systems) in the receiving societies contribute to their life satisfaction. Results indicate that satisfaction with the economy is the strongest correlate of individual life satisfaction among European immigrants, and this association is particularly pronounced among immigrants from Turkey, Eastern and Southern Europe. Assuming that immigrants compare institutions of their host and home countries when assessing institutional features of the host countries, relative gains in satisfaction with the performance of host-country economy are shown to be associated with particularly higher levels of overall life satisfaction among immigrants from Turkey, Eastern and Southern European countries than the rest of Europe. We conclude that, in relative terms, migrants from countries with less well-functioning economies to countries with more favorable economic conditions display higher levels of perceived satisfaction with the host country economies, which contributes considerably to their overall life satisfaction.

In this study, we examined the effect of contact use on the gender earnings gap in urban China, by taking into account the existence of self-selection effect. We theorised two sources of individuals' self-selected job obtainment behaviour; namely, the structuralised gender-segregated employment environment and one's internalisation of the structural constraints. Based on data collected from the highly marketized Chinese city Xiamen, our estimations from the Endogenous Switching Regression model show that there is indeed a significant tendency, in which women with marketable qualifications use social contacts to find jobs, even though their obtained income would have increased significantly had they chosen not to rely on contacts to find jobs. Men enjoyed premiums from their job search strategies, whether they relied on contact use or not.

Unlike the majority of existing studies that explain the gender earnings gap from a structural perspective, this study aims to understand the unexplained part of gender earnings inequality from a behavioural perspective. By adopting a dataset collected in the Chinese city of Xiamen when China's market economy was still in formation, this study focuses on how earnings are affected by contact use in job placement. Results based on the quantile regression model show that contact use significantly narrows the average gender earnings gap by enhancing women's earnings in the lower to middle levels of the earnings hierarchy, but this positive role that women's contact use plays in their earnings outcome disappears in the upper level of the earnings hierarchy. This study thus calls for scholarly attention to the contextually sensitive consequences of individual behaviour in terms of understanding the part of gender earnings inequality that cannot be explained by the existing literature.

We explore how participation by immigrants in voluntary groups is related to their social contact patterns. Our discussion is guided by the structural integration and the homophily perspectives. Drawing from the 2008 Canadian General Social Survey, the findings in general support the structural integration perspective. The findings also show that frequency of participation in voluntary groups and number of voluntary associations participated have independent and significant positive relationships with socioeconomic range of contact and number of high-status contacts, except that the number of voluntary associations involved does not relate to the number of high-status contacts among immigrants. In addition, the findings show that receiving education overseas does not relate to the range of contact and high-status contact. However, visible minority immigrants significantly has lower socioeconomic range of contact than other immigrants even controlling for voluntary association participation.

Although decades of research have contributed to understanding the operation and implications of minority-concentrated industrial sectors, the reasons for concentration in some sectors but not others remain unclear. To address the question of why some sectors are minority concentrated, this article draws on four sources of literature—human ecology, dual labour market, ethnic enclave and occupational niche—to explore how the factors derived from the literature help to explain the concentration of minority groups in specific industries. The study is based on specially requested tables of the 2001 Canadian census from Statistics Canada. An in-depth comparison is made of the concentration of Chinese in industrial sectors in three major metropolitan areas that have large proportions of Chinese (Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary). Implications of results are discussed.