Effects of ethnic group density on young migrants' health and health behaviour.

Throughout the 20th century and the beginning of the current one there has been a drastic increase in ethnic diversity in many European societies.

From a sociology of health perspective these developments pose the question of how processes of acculturation, and with it levels of acculturative stress, often seen as responsible for many of the adverse health effects of migration, are altered if the standard assumption of an allochthonous ethnic minority acculturating to the ways of an autochthonous ethnic majority is violated. The ethnic density hypothesis suggests that an increase in own ethnic group density or overall ethnic minority density, through facilitating social support networks among co-ethnics, decreasing the rates and altering the perception of incidences of interpersonal racism and lowering the gap between acculturation and ecology can have a buffering effect on the adverse health effects of migrant status. This contribution, relying on data from the 2013-14 wave of the Luxembourgish Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) study, investigates the relationship between young migrants’ health and health behaviour and ethnic density in school classes. School classes, as an essential part of school-students’ immediate social environment, constitute an important acculturation context. At the same time, Luxembourg, as one of the most diverse countries in Europe, where almost two thirds of school-aged children have a migration background and only roughly 17% of first- and second-generation migrants attend classes with a native majority, presents itself as the ideal national context to explore the implications of increasing levels of ethnic diversity for migrant health and, due to its high variance in ethnic density between classes, offers enough statistical power to detect the sketched potential moderating effects.