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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Public Health
Sec. Life-Course Epidemiology and Social Inequalities in Health
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1521387

School performance gap between non-immigrant and secondgeneration immigrant children in Sweden -time trends and contributing factors

Provisionally accepted
Kenta Okuyama Kenta Okuyama 1*Sara Larsson Lönn Sara Larsson Lönn 2Ardavan M. Khoshnood Ardavan M. Khoshnood 2,3Shervin Assari Shervin Assari 4Jan Sundquist Jan Sundquist 2Kristina Sundquist Kristina Sundquist 2
  • 1 Lund University, Lund, Sweden
  • 2 Center for Primary Health Care Research, Lund University, Malmö, Sweden
  • 3 Department of Clinical Sciences Malmö, Faculty of Medicine, Lund University, Malmö, Sweden
  • 4 Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, Los Angeles, California, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    We aimed to investigate the school performance gap and its potential trend from 2010 to 2020 in non-immigrant and second-generation immigrant children in Sweden, whether parental mental disorders and low socioeconomic status contribute to this gap and its trends, and whether the effects of these factors differ by immigration status. We used multiple Swedish population registers, including 829,787 children born 1994-2004. We examined the school performance gap and its trends by the interaction between immigration status and year with linear mixed models. We assessed whether parental mental disorders and socioeconomic status contributed to this gap and its trends, and whether their effects on school performance differ by immigration status.The existing gap was explained by parental mental disorders in addition to parental education and neighborhood socioeconomic status for both males and females. The unadjusted model suggested an increasing trend of the existing gap in school performance by immigration status for both males and females. In the adjusted model, the increasing trend of the gap remained among males and was partially attributed to parental education and neighborhood socioeconomic status. The interaction tests showed that the potential effects of these factors on school performance were smaller among second-generation immigrant children.Efforts to reduce the effects of socioeconomic inequalities and parental mental disorders are warranted in addition to extra support for second-generation immigrant children at schools.

    Keywords: Gap1, immigrant2, parental mental disorder3, school performance4, socioeconomic status5 Reviewer 2: comment 4 Commented [KO5]: Reviewer 2: comment 5 Reviewer 1: comment 2 Commented [KO12]: Reviewer 1: comment 3 Commented [KO13]: Reviewer 1: comment 12

    Received: 01 Nov 2024; Accepted: 06 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Okuyama, Lönn, Khoshnood, Assari, Sundquist and Sundquist. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Kenta Okuyama, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.