The Effect of Civic Participation and Differences Between Older Migrants and Natives in Europe on Social Trust

Abstract

Migrants hold a progressively larger share of older adults in many European countries, but transnational ageing experience has hardly been examined by scholars outside of health and economic dimensions. The present research addresses the question of how civic participation and sociodemographic factors including migration status effect social trust of older adults drawing on Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe data wave five. There are 30067 respondents age 50 and over in the sample from nine European countries. Our results support the theoretical perspective that the more civic participation types older adults were involved, the more social trust they had. The results of hierarchical regression also showed that being a first and second generation migrant effected social trust negatively, even after controlling for sociodemographic factors and health. This is surprising giving the fact that there were differences between migration generations in civic participation according to Poisson regression analysis: In reference to natives, while being a first generation migrant affected civic participation negatively, there were no significant effect of being a second generation migrant.