Social Reproduction of Religiosity in the Immigrant Context: The Role of Family Transmission and Family Formation — Evidence from France

Talking About Religion? Differences in Religious Socialization Among Recently Arrived Refugees Between Quebec and Other Provinces in Canada

How does context shapes religious practices and religious expression of immigrants? Existing work has focussed on changes over the long term and across generations. We argue that context can shape religious practice shortly after arrival. Using a nationally representative survey of Syrian refugees with children who arrived between late 2015 and 2018, we examine how often parents talk to their children about religion, a central mechanism in religious socialization. We compare Quebec, which has become increasingly restrictive about public religious expression to other Canadian provinces, which are often upheld as exemplars of multicultural accommodation. Syrian refugees in Quebec, especially mothers, report significantly less frequent religious discussions with their children than those in other provinces, regardless of whether they are Christian or Muslim. This pattern is not explained by pre-migration religiosity or settlement selection, suggesting that Quebec's distinct socio-political environment shapes religious expression soon after arrival.

Minor Forms of Parental Maltreatment and Educational Achievement of Immigrant Youths in Young Adulthood: A Longitudinal Study

Parental hostility and emotional rejection-or aggregated as general harsh family interactions with parents-have received little research attention due to such parent-child interactions being counted as minor forms of parental maltreatment and regarded as being less harmful. However, recent research showed that these minor forms of parental maltreatment on youth development are far from negligibility on account of their frequency, chronicity, and incessancy. In this longitudinal study, we investigated how parental hostility, emotional rejection, and harsh family interactions with parents of in early adolescence of immigrant youths (wave-1 M_age = 14) adversely impact successful college graduation of immigrant youths in young adulthood (wave-3 M_age = 24) through the mediation of their development of academic aspirations in late adolescence (wave-2 M_age = 17). Using data from a representative sample of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (N = 3344), the current study revealed that parental hostility, emotional rejection, and harsh family interactions with parents significantly impaired successful college graduation of immigrant youths in young adulthood, with the decreased odds of 20.1% to 30.22%. Furthermore, academic aspirations of immigrant youths in late adolescence not only significantly mediated the abovementioned relationships but also contributed to the higher odds of immigrant youths' college graduation by 2.226 to 2.257 times. Findings of this study related to educational innovations, family services, and policy implications are discussed herein.

Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way? Social and Mental Forces of Successful Adaptation of Immigrant Children in Young Adulthood

Although the twenty-first century is deemed as a new era of globalization, waves of immigration continue, due to disparities between politically and economically unstable regions and Western democratized and developed countries. Immigration research has therefore reignited its attention on the successful adaptation of immigrants’ offspring, which has profound implications for Western immigrant-receiving countries, as well as worldwide stability. Although immigration research mainly informed by the conventional assimilation theory and/or segmented assimilation perspective accentuates the importance of structural factors, termed as social forces here, in relation to immigrant children’s successful adaptation in adolescence, an argument of determinism and tenability keeps on and the contribution of human mental resources and determination, termed as mental forces here, in shaping life trajectories of immigrant children should be not ignored. For this, with a representative sample of 3344 immigrant children from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), we examined and compared both the effects of social and mental forces measured in adolescence of immigrant children on their multiple adaptation outcomes in terms of college graduation, engagement in postgraduate study, and first and current job attainments in young adulthood with a Bayesian multilevel modeling framework. The results found that both social forces of segmented assimilation theory and mental forces of immigrant children in adolescence were significantly predictive of immigrant children’s successful adaptation in young adulthood (OR = 1.088–2.959 and β = 0.050–0.639 for social forces; OR = 11.290–18.119 and β = 0.293–0.297 for mental forces), in which, although the latter showed stronger effects than the former, the effects of mental forces on adaptation of immigrant children were conditionally shaped by the contexts of the social forces informed by segmented assimilation theory. The findings of the current study highlight the significance of the organism–environment interaction perspective on immigration research and provide an insight to consider a context-driven response thesis proposed.

Researching religion and migration 20 years after '9/11': Taking stock and looking ahead

This contribution to the special issue on religion and migration reviews two decades of large-scale survey research on changes in immigrant religion and the relationship between immigrants' level of religiosity and their integration into European societies. The body of work reveals that Muslims in European societies stand out due to their comparatively high levels of religiosity and greater stability in religiosity over time and across immigrant generations. While the comparative picture is rather clear, findings regarding the long-term trend in Muslims' religiosity and its association with immigrant integration are instead inconclusive. A systematic review of empirical studies of the association of (various indicators of) individual religiosity with immigrant integration reveals positive, negative and non-significant results for all outcomes and domains. Thus, based on the current state of art it is hard to assess whether and why religion forms a bridge or barrier to immigrant integration in Europe. To move the field forward, the contribution ends with a twofold proposal for a research agenda that includes a broadened empirical scope, moving beyond the focus on Sunni Muslims, and a conceptual extension that focuses on differences in reasoning about religion and religious meaning-making as additional, potentially more consistent and more powerful explanation for immigrants' social relations and positions in their new societies.

Online activity of mosques and Muslims in the Netherlands: A study of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter

Research on Muslim minorities in western societies has mainly focused on offline behavior, such as mosque attendance, whereas little is known about their presence in the online world. This study explores the online visibility and activities of all (478) mosques in the Netherlands. We collected data on personal websites and four social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube). The majority of mosques have a website (52%) and an account on Facebook (61%). Less often used are Twitter (17%), Instagram (17%) and YouTube (19%). On social media platforms, mosques strongly differ in their activity and number of followers. We find evidence to suggest that Salafist mosques, which tend to have a strict ideology, are more active on Twitter and YouTube, and also attract a larger share of followers on Facebook than non-Salafist mosques. Our more fine-grained analysis on Twitter shows that Salafist mosques in the Netherlands cluster together. Followers of Salafist mosques make up a community of users who are mainly connected to each other ("bonding ties"), and much less so to other users ("bridging ties"). We conclude with a discussion of opportunities for studying the online presence and activities of mosques and Muslims in western societies.

Immigrants’ Religious Transmission in Southern Europe: Reaction or Assimilation? Evidence from Italy

In recent decades, scholars have been increasingly interested in analysing immigrants’ religiosity in Europe. In this article, we provide evidence about how the patterns of religious transmission are shaped by religious characteristics of both the origin and receiving contexts. We do so by focusing on Italy, which is both an almost homogeneously Catholic country and a fairly recent immigration destination, and by analysing three different dimensions of religiosity: service attendance, prayer and importance of religion. By relying on the “Social conditions and integration of foreign citizens” survey (ISTAT, 2011–2012), we fill an important theoretical and geographical gap by analysing differences in religiosity between parents and children. We claim that immigrant groups who share many characteristics with the natives tend to assimilate by adopting the same patterns of transmission (for example, Romanians in Italy). In contrast, immigrants who come from very different religious contexts, such as the Muslim Moroccan group, strongly react to this diversity by emphasising the transmission of their own religiosity. If, instead, immigrants come from a very secular country, such as Albania, they also tend to replicate this feature in the receiving countries, thus progressively weakening their religiosity and also their denominational differences. Overall, it is the interplay between origin and destination context which matters the most in shaping the patterns of religious transmission.

Mode of Difference and Resource for Resilience: How Religion Shapes Experiences of Discrimination of the Second Generation in France

There are two sides to cultural practices such as religion: on the one hand, they connect families across generations and space and can embed resources. On the other, as is the case with Muslim immigrants in Europe, they can become markers of difference and create social distance. Drawing on data on the schooling experiences of children of immigrants in France and on information concerning their religious and linguistic family context when growing up, this article maps these two aspects. Although those growing up in Muslim families are significantly more likely to report discrimination than those from Christian or nonreligious families, neither the degree of religiosity nor the presence of parental home-country language was associated with the probability of reporting discrimination. However, for those growing up in Muslim families, a religious family environment seems to protect against negative reactions such as losing interest in academic matters, whereas no such effects are found in Christian families or for home-country language. These findings show that religion is not only a consequential symbolic barrier that Muslims encounter in Europe but also, for those who are religious, a resource to cope with experiences of exclusion — a constellation that may prove consequential for dynamics of integration.