Ageing in a foreign country: determinants of self-rated health among older migrants in Italy

ABSTRACT

Within a framework of increasing ethnic diversity of developed countries' population, a growing body of migration literature has focused on migrants’ health. Nonetheless, although ageing is a major demographic trend of western societies involving both natives and migrants, older migrants remain a relatively under-researched group so far. In Italy, despite the increasing incidence of migration on total population, its fast ageing process, and the acknowledged difficulties that migrants face in becoming full members of the Italian  society, thus far, very little is known about the migrant population approaching old age. Our study focuses on the main protective and risk factors of health in later life using a unique dataset from the ‘Social condition and integration of foreign citizens’ (SCIF)’ survey conducted by ISTAT between 2011 and 2012. Our findings show that a number of variables related to both the migration process and living conditions in Italy are important determinants of self-rated health, stressing the necessity to design and implement tailored policy responses and services that address migrants’ vulnerabilities in later life.

KEYWORDS:

• self-rated health
• older migrants
• SCIF survey
• Italy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 These are not the latest population projections that do not provide separated estimates for the foreign-born population. However, we compared the projections base 2007 for the year 2017 and the population distribution in 2017 for foreign-born population aged 55 and over and they resulted consistent.

2 For further details, see http://www.istat.it/it/archivio/10825. To support migrants with poor knowledge of Italian language, the questionnaire was translated into the main languages spoken by migrants in Italy such as Spanish, French, German, English, Albanian, Russian, Romanian, Chinese and Arabic.

3 We restrict our analysis to 50+ individuals following the same approach of surveys widely used in demography to study ageing populations such as the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) and the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (HRS), whose target populations consist of individuals who are 50 years and older.

4 Namely less developed countries and Central and Eastern European countries.

5 In this group, we find both individuals (29%) who arrived in Italy at the age of 50 and over, and migrants who arrived at younger ages and settled in the country.

6 Language skills and in particular proficiency in reading is considered as particularly important in relation to older migrants’ health literacy (Kristiansen et al. 2016).

7 For further details see https://www.istat.it/it/files//2017/04/Consumo_alcol_in_Italia_2016.pdf.

8 We used the WHO’s classification World Health Organization (WHO 2000).

9 The original variable was revealed according to a 5-points Likert scale ranging from ‘very good’ to ‘very bad’, we have implemented also an ordinal logistic regression model, but we excluded this option because the model did not support the hypothesis of proportional Odds. 

10 We performed all pairwise comparisons between the categories of the variable country of origin.