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Multicultural Policy and Social Integration: The Case of Multicultural Education Policy and Its Effect on Immigrant Children’s Sense of Belonging to School

Yang Kyung-Eun 1 Ham Seung-Hwan 2

1University of Toronto
2한양대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

With accelerating economic and cultural globalization processes that involve increased international migration on a global scale, policy circles around the world have paid sustained attention to multicultual policy and its significance for social integration. Despite the spread of multicultural policies, little has been done for systematic evaluations of those policies. As an attempt toward filling this void in research, this study empirically examines the effect of multicultural education policy on immigrant children’s sense of belonging to school. Based on a cross-national sample of approximately 150 thousand children selected from about nine thousand schools across 29 OECD member states, a three-level hierarchical linear modeling analysis has been conducted. The main findings clearly indicate that the degree of institutionalization of multicultural education policy on a country level is fairly strongly associated with the level of immigrant children’s sense of belonging to school. This provides a piece of suggestive evidence that multicultural policy, if firmly institutionalized and successfully implemented, can really work toward social integration. This result calls for more extensive research to evaluate various in tended and unintended effects of diverse forms of multicultural policy on individuals and society.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.