Identification and comparison of school well-being patterns of migrant and native lower secondary-school students in Greece and Switzerland: A multigroup latent profile analysis approach

Abstract Questionnaire data from a cross-sectional study of two samples on adolescents of 814 lower secondary school students (M_age = 12.47) from Greece (n = 439) and Switzerland (n = 375) were used to identify and compare school well-being patterns of migrant and native students by multigroup latent profile analyses (LPA). The aim of this paper, by applying LPA as a typological approach, is to delve empirically into the question whether migrant and native lower secondary school students in Greece and Switzerland have different school well-being patterns. We detected three very similar school well-being patterns among migrant and native students for both countries. To compare the identified well-being patterns, we tested, using variance analysis with the Games-Howell post hoc test, the respective levels of the seven introduced well-being indicators: The highest school well-being pattern for migrant and native students is derived from a combination of low levels of fear/depression and high levels of self-determination, self-efficacy, and self-esteem in conjunction with high levels of life satisfaction, general well-being, and satisfaction with grades at school. In order to understand the socialization conditions under which the respective school well-being patterns emerged, we ran a multinomial regression analysis on the identified well-being patterns related to teacher support and resilience. Overall, we found that higher levels of social support, as introduced via teacher support and resilience, play a great role in determining the school well-being level that a young person achieves.