Multicultural Integration Policy as an Explanatory Factor of Immigrant Social Belonging: Multilevel Evidence for a Multilevel Construct

Large-scale international assessments, like the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), are useful tools to help track social and educational outcomes. PISA is a test administered to students in the most developed and developing economies in the world such as Australia, Canada, EU countries, the USA as well as those like Brazil or China. PISA explicitly rates/ranks country-level education systems to inform policy development, which implicitly invokes a multilevel framework within an ecological framework. I provide multilevel, validity evidence of the unidimensionality of PISA’s social belonging measure with consideration for one’s immigration background in 36 countries. Then, I demonstrate that the multicultural policy context in host countries defines and effects the social belonging for students with a migration background. Results suggest that students with an immigration background experience decreased levels of social belonging in school when compared to native-born heritage students but that national-level policy can support these students. The novelty of including national-level policy as a part of the ecological framework of construct validation offers the measurement field an example of a more holistic evaluation of immigrant integration using psychological constructs. Much theoretical lip service has been said that policies and country-level characteristics are a part of a larger ecological model of item response and the validation process, but little research has actually been done. This research is the first to make the explicit connection between policy and immigrant outcomes in the context of measurement and validity showing how the policy context, in part, defines the construct of social belonging.