Risks and resilience in immigrant youth adaptation: Who succeeds in the Greek school context and why?

Abstract

Positive immigrant youth adaptation in the school context is a sign that development and acculturation are proceeding well. It is also a predictor of positive adult outcomes. Significant diversity has been observed in the adaptive success of immigrant youth, revealing a mixture of risk and paradox. In this article, I draw on data from a three-wave longitudinal project, the Athena Study of Resilient Adaptation, to examine the question of who among immigrant youth succeeds in the Greek school context and why. The study focused on immigrants from Albania and ethnic Greeks from the former Soviet Union. Findings from this study do not support the well-known immigrant paradox, where immigrant youth adaptation is positive and at times better than that of their non-immigrant peers. Instead, immigrant youth adaptation in the school context was worse than that of their Greek peers, both concurrently and over time, and especially with respect to core developmental tasks. Moreover, neither immigrant generation nor ethnic group significantly differentiated these results. Immigrant youth's personal and social capital contributed to individual differences in their adaptation. It is argued that these results may reflect societal-level influences, such as the low tolerance for diversity in Greek society and the almost complete lack of institutionalized educational support.

Keywords::

• Immigration
• Adaptation, Risk
• Resilience
• Immigrant Paradox

I would like to thank Ann Masten and an anonymous reviewer for their constructive comments.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

This work was supported by an Excellence Grant cofunded by the European Social Fund and Greek National Resources through the Operational Programme “Education and Lifelong Learning” of the National Strategic Reference Framework-Research Funding Program: Aristeia II.

Notes

This paper is based on author's Presidential Address delivered at the 16th European Conference on Developmental Psychology, September 2013, Lausanne, Switzerland. Work on this article was supported by an Excellence Grant co-funded by the European Social Fund and Greek National Resources through the Operational Program “Education and Lifelong Learning” of the National Strategic Reference Framework-Research Funding Program: Aristeia II.