Dealing with Omitted Answers in a Survey on Social Integration of Immigrants in Italy

Surveys are used to infer the level of social integration of immigrants. Itemresponse theory helps to describe the relationship between responses to testitems and latent traits of interest. However, in the presence of nonignorablemissing data, which are omitted responses depending on the latent traitsto be measured, estimates of the model parameters are biased. To accountfor nonignorable missing data, the quantity and quality of contacts betweenimmigrants and natives (so called “social integration”) are taken into accountthrough a linear function of the response propensity. Higher education, nointention to migrate again, young age, Albanian nationality , and declaring a non muslim religion or none, comparatively favor social integration.