Integration theories assume that ingroup partnering (endogamy) among individuals of immigrant background declines as their exposure to majority society increases. We examine this for Sweden, a country with a large and diverse immigrant population. We study cohorts born 1986–1998 who either immigrated as children or were born in Sweden, thereby excluding pre-migration partnerships. We analyse both temporal and spatial exposure using population register data (n>1,000,000) covering both marriages and consensual unions. Our findings show high levels of endogamy by origin group, particularly among those with parents from the Middle East and Africa, where endogamy rates at country level range from 40% to 60%. Partnering with someone of majority background is rare, especially among women. The time exposure hypothesis finds some support as endogamy is higher the older a person was upon immigration. Also, for the second generation, endogamy declines with the family’s time in Sweden, although it remains high even after many years for several groups. Surprisingly, we find little evidence that spatial segregation drives endogamy. Ingroup partnering persists even with few co-ethnics in the neighbourhood, perhaps due to online meeting opportunities. Cultural attraction and aversion mechanisms appear to be more decisive than the opportunity structure for partnering.

Religious decline, often observed among North American Christian youth, may not apply universally. We examined this and whether religiosity is associated with well-being, risk behavior, cultural values, and acculturation among 4080 Muslim and Christian adolescents aged 15–22 in Germany. Utilizing seven waves from the CILS4EU project and a person-oriented analytical approach, we identified different religious trajectories for Muslim (58% high, 31% low, 11% increasing), immigrant-origin Christian (68% low, 32% medium), and non-immigrant Christian (74% low, 17% decreasing, 9% medium) youth. High and medium trajectories were associated with greater well-being, lower risk behavior, more conservative attitudes, and less sociocultural integration. To fully understand religious development, we must consider diverse national contexts and groups, employing long-term perspectives and person-centered analyses.

There has recently been renewed interest in occupational mobility over the life-course. We argue that such studies should place greater emphasis on organisational and social embeddings of occupations as key drivers of mobility. Occupations are interconnected by their organisational, regional, and industrial contexts, which create mobility opportunities. These contexts also foster social relations that underpin classic mobility predictors such as social capital, cultural capital, and aspiration, all of which guide occupational choices. Building on the idea that social and organisational relations between occupations shape the overall structure of social mobility, we devise a structural model that focuses not on variables, but on emergent mobility patterns. We conceptualise the mobility table as a network, fitting a loglinear model including concentration, reciprocity, and clustering parameters. This model is applied to analyse intra-generational mobility between 59 micro-classes in the UK during the first decade of this century, using data from the British Household Panel Survey. We find that emergent patterns are strong predictors of mobility. When comparing our model to a conventional social-class based one, we find that social-class parameters decrease by 88 % after the inclusion of network patterns. We conclude that the socio-organisational embeddedness of occupations is an overlooked structuring force behind work-life mobility.

In many Western countries, researchers have documented ambitious educational choices among students of immigrant origin, for example, the tendency to choose academically more demanding routes than others at given levels of school achievement (e.g. grades, GPA). While this may indicate integration, some warn against an ‘immigrant optimism trap’, because choosing more demanding tracks at lower levels of GPA may increase risks of non-completion. Using longitudinal Swedish population data (n ≈ 90,000), we estimate an upper secondary ‘ethnic completion gap’ of 12 per cent to the detriment of students of immigrant background. We then address the ‘trap hypothesis’ via two analyses. The first shows that if students of immigration background would make similar educational choices as other students at the same GPA, the completion gap would shrink by 3.4 percentage points. The second analysis, based on simulations, suggests that restricting admission to academic programmes based on prior GPA, would lead to a massive relocation of low- and mid-GPA students to—usually less demanding—vocational programmes, but would only reduce the completion gap by 2.2 percentage points. These changes must be considered marginal in view of the substantial restrictions of choice that either of these measures would entail. We conclude that completion gaps are not primarily a result of unfounded immigrant optimism, and that optimistic choices are likely to be a net positive for integration by improving the chances of immigrant youth to reach tertiary-level qualifications and professional occupations.

High levels of ethnic segregation have been widely observed in school friendship networks, whereas the degree to which school bullying networks are divided along ethnic lines remains uncertain. Using data from 981 students (53% girls, 47% boys; 11–14 years of age) in British schools, we sought to visualize, quantify, and compare the degree of ethnic segregation in friendship and bullying networks. Our findings contradict the common belief that ethnic segregation in friendship networks fosters interethnic conflict; instead, we identified similarly high levels of ethnic segregation in both friendship and bullying networks. Students may therefore simultaneously avoid positive and negative interethnic relationships. The findings indicate that positive and negative networks should both be considered to provide a comprehensive assessment of interethnic relations in the school environment.

Diskussionen om integration i Sverige behöver förnyas. Den är visserligenpassionerad och livlig men bygger till stor del på framhävandet av enstakafall, anekdotiska belägg och känslor. I diskussioner där starka känslor är in-blandade kan det vara svårt att ta till sig information som inte passar den åsiktman redan har – faktaresistensen drabbar oss alla. Men med en förhoppningom att politiker, samhällsdebattörer, studenter, forskare och människor i all-mänhet har både intresse och respekt för hur verkligheten faktiskt ser ut villvi med denna bok bidra till en kunskapsgrund som kan göra integrations-debatten mer konstruktiv.

Att beskriva integration som lyckad eller misslyckad är vilseledande, då slutsatserna beror på vad man syftar på – som inkomst, utbildning, värderingar eller religiositet. Vår studie visar att integrationen bland unga i Sverige är både långt borta och nära, beroende på vilken dimension som avses, skriver sociologiprofessorerna Jan O Jonsson och Carina Mood.

Alla har sett de återkommande rubrikerna om att fattigdomen, alternativt barnfattigdomen, ökar. Men fattigdomen har faktiskt inte ökat sedan mitten av 1990-talet i Sverige. Det som har ökat är istället förekomsten av teoretiskt tvivelaktiga och urvattnade mått på fattigdom. Vi redogör för de grundläg-gande teorierna bakom olika fattigdomsmått och argumenterar för använ-dandet av mått som är förankrade i vanliga människors uppfattning om fattig-dom. Ett sådant mått bör utgå från brister i ekonomiska och/eller materiella resurser och operationaliseras som materiell deprivation eller som ’absolut inkomstfattigdom’, där inkomsterna relateras till olika socialt bestämda nöd-vändigheter. Ett sådant mer renodlat fattigdomsmått bör komplettera, men inte förväxlas med andra väsentliga samhällsfenomen, till exempel ojämlik-het och levnadsnivå; skilja sig från dem operationellt, precis som de skiljer sig teoretiskt.

We are used to headlines saying that poverty increases, but poverty has in fact not increased in Sweden since the 1990s. What has increased is instead the use of theoretically questionable and diluted measures of poverty. We describe the basic theories behind different types of poverty measures, and argue that we should use one that is grounded in ordinary people’s concep-tion of poverty. Such measure should be based on the notion of shortage of economic or material resources, and be operationalised as either material deprivation or ‘absolute income poverty’, where incomes are related to soci-ally determined necessities. Such a ‘pure’ poverty measure should comple-ment but not be confounded with other important societal phenomena, such as inequality or level-of-living; differ from them in the definition just as they differ theoretically.