Sweden: The "Otherization" of the Descendants of Immigrants

• This chapter offers a systematic review of the literature on educational inequality and school attainments of immigrants’ offspring in Sweden. The review covers research conducted between 1990 and 2015 and critically examines how different research traditions explain this inequality. The chapter begins by mapping the key characteristics of the Swedish educational system together with Swedish immigration patterns. Thereafter, five major research traditions that explain educational inequality and ethnic background in Sweden are presented. These perspectives include (1) political arithmetic; (2) racism and discrimination; (3) language proficiency tradition; (4) school choice and school segregation; and (5) cultural and social capital and socio-historical contexts. The ‘political arithmetic’ tradition, which starts mainly from a positivistic approach and employs large-scale, quantitative research strategies, has focused on the individual and demographic characteristics of pupils. The main assumption of the other research clusters is that there are important contextual circumstances (beyond individual factors) which decisively affect the educational achievements of the descendants of immigrants. While often dominated by qualitative approaches, these types of research do sometimes include quantitatively designed studies. These research traditions take a more critical stance on government policies, which have produced an extremely segregated school system, and show the consequences of a concentration of children of families from vulnerable groups (economically disadvantaged and immigrant groups in marginalized neighborhoods) in schools with limited resources.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Sociologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Sociology (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Annan samhällsvetenskap -- Internationell migration och etniska relationer (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Other Social Sciences -- International Migration and Ethnic Relations (hsv//eng)

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kap (subject category)