Title: Socialization and institutionalization effects on immigrants' social trust
Abstract: Trust can be conceived as a manifestation of capital1 as well as a moral value2. At individual level, its formations is seen either as product of early socialization which acts as a stable trait over ones' life, either as shaped by continuous exposure to culture and institutions3. In the capital debate, the discussion of social capital regimes4 and cultures of participation5 stresses the societal embeddedness of both trust6 and sociability. In the sociology of values, two main sets of theories address contextual determinants of value formation and change7. The socialization hypothesis8 assumes that values form during early socialization. The institutionalization hypothesis9 claims that the institutional settings determine changes over the entire lifespan. This paper asks what happens with individuals when move from a context to another? My answer is that trust is a stable trait, in the sense that it is determined by the culture of primary socialization, but it also is adaptive to the culture of trust that exists in the society where one resides.Immigration provides a vast natural experiment10 that can be employed to study the process. Lacking panel data to assess if individuals change their levels of trust when moving from one society to another, one may compare migrants to similar individuals who did not migrate. They might be either stayers (people from emigration countries who continue to live in their country of origin) or natives (non-migrants in immigration countries). Such people share with immigrants their exposure to either the culture of origin or the culture of current residence. One may also want to compare immigrants with other immigrants of different origin and the same host society. Therefore, there are three relevant comparisons: immigrants-stayers, immigrants-natives, immigrants-other immigrants. Simultaneously testing for them with cross- sectional data is feasible if one employs cross-classified multilevel analyses, and has access to information on indicators describing trust cultures in both origin and host societies. To do so, I use datasets provided by the value surveys, particularly the 2008 wave of the European Values Survey (EVS).Scholars dealing with international migrants' levels of trust have addressed the topic in recent studies11. Dinesen12 and Dinesen and Hooghe13 proved that, in the case of international migrants, both origin and host societies play a role in determining trust. I go further and I test simultaneously the two explanations existing in the literature. Using EVS data, this paper compares among host societies, and includes simultaneously much more countries of origin than previous studies. A deeper analysis of the interaction effects of the cultural gap between the host country and the country of origin, of the stock of immigrants in the host society, and of their overall connectivity to their country of origin add as novelty to existing literature. They provide empirical evidence for theoretical considerations around the structural conditions that may shape the dual impact of early socialization and later exposure to culture and institutions.The paper gradually builds the hypotheses. First it uses existing literature to describe how the context in which one lives shapes one's trust. Context, in this paper, is not about personalized experiences, but refers to the continuous interaction through the environment determines values and behaviors. Second, the paper reviews the literature connecting trust and international migration, and uses it to further refine the double-contextuality assumption. The section on data sources and methodological solutions focuses on computing indicators and overcoming the difficulties due to data availability. Cross-classified models produce the findings. The conclusion discusses implications for existing literature and for future research.Contextual Determinants of Social TrustSocial or generalized trust refers to the extent to which people believe that unknown persons or other members of the society are trustworthy14. …
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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