Development of life satisfaction in immigrant youth: The role of transition decisions and cultural identification.

Life satisfaction is an indicator of successful psychological adjustment, especially in adolescence, and a predictor of important developmental outcomes such as agency beliefs, self-acceptance, risk behavior, and mental health. For immigrant youth, it also indicates subjective integration into the host society. In societies with increasing ethnic diversity, it is therefore crucial to understand how life satisfaction develops among immigrant youth. To date, little is known about how educational transitions affect the life satisfaction of immigrant youth. The present study contributes to closing this gap by using latent growth curve models and autoregressive structural equation models to investigate life satisfaction development in immigrant youth from midadolescence to young adulthood as dependent on transition decisions and cultural identification. It uses data from the German National Educational Panel Study-Start Cohort 4, which surveyed N = 16,378 15-year-olds from 2010 to 2020 in 12 survey waves. The results of latent growth curve models showed that intraindividual trajectories of life satisfaction were strongly dependent on the educational and vocational transitions made at the end of compulsory schooling. Deliberate and self-determined transitions into new social environments boosted life satisfaction and at the same time offered less well-adjusted adolescents a second chance to compensate for developmental risks. Autoregressive structural equation model analyses showed that, with regard to the development of interindividual differences in life satisfaction, secure identifications with either the culture of origin or the culture of the host country were mutually substitutable resilience factors during midadolescence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).