Longitudinal aspects of the interaction between health and integration of refugees in Germany (LARGE)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jürgen Schupp, since 4/2022
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research ; Public Health, Healthcare Research, Social and Occupational Medicine
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 409654512

The main objective of LARGE is to determine how refugees’ health influences and is influenced by the process of social and legal integration, and how these individual-level factors associated with “othering” are complemented and moderated by regional and family context factors in their influence on health. Based on a large-scale representative sample of refugees in Germany, this sub-project of the PH-LENS research unit consists of two work packages that contribute the research unit’s thematic areas. The first work package will investigate the reciprocal relationship between health and integration. The second work package will take refugees’ area of residence and familial structures into account as important determinants and moderators of their living and health situation. On this basis, the interaction between individual integration, legal status, health and context factors will be estimated, providing additional theoretical and empirical evidence on “contextual (small-area) effects on health” addressed in the PH-LENS project.To achieve its own objectives and contribute to the overall work of the research unit, LARGE will have five main lines of cooperation within the research unit. First, it will provide geocoded survey data on housing and neighborhood indicators of refugees to the DEPRIV project for the further development of its regional deprivations index. Second, jointly with ENSURE project, we will evaluate measurement invariance of health measures used in our multipurpose survey of a heterogeneous refugee population. Third, joint analysis of the health situation of mothers and their newborn children will be conducted together with Theda Borde and Matthias David from the PROREF project. Fourth, the NEXUS project and LARGE will develop a harmonized approach to use external variation of regional housing assignments to identify contextual effects. Fifth, the continuing data collection in the IAB-BAMF-SOEP survey allows the integration of questions relevant for the OTHER and TREAT project.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2928: Refugee migration to Germany: a magnifying glass for broader public health challenges (PH-LENS)
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Dr. Hannes Kröger, until 4/2022