This study investigated the association between self-perceived workplace discrimination and mental well-being among immigrant workers in Italy, including other personal experiences like self-perceived loneliness, level of life satisfaction, and perceived physical health.
We hypothesize that S-PWD may affect MCS directly and through the influences of some psychophysical factors like personal experiences (like S-PL and LS) as well as self-reported physical status. Our results underline and quantify the relationship between S-PWD and mental health outcomes, directly as well as through S-PL, LS, and PCS as mediators, having defined a path analysis from the conceptual model proposed by Pascoe and Smart Richman [10]. In our study S-PWD acted on MCS both through a direct relationship, which we estimated as 68.9% of the total effect, and also through an indirect relationship mediated by S-PL (13.6%), LS (13.6%), and PCS (3.9%). In particular, we found negative effect of S-PWD on MCS when it was mediated by S-PL and low level of LS, while the indirect effect mediated by PCS was positive, as the product of two negative effects (S-PWD on PCS and PCS on MCS).
In our study, discrimination was a subjective construct without verification of related events. Our findings confirmed previous research that underlined the relationship between workplace discrimination and mental health in a large and heterogeneous immigrant sample [27]. It would seem that perceived discrimination - whether suffered during a current or a past job - can act as a predictor of deterioration in perceived mental health, as already demonstrated by other studies [9, 11, 20, 21, 27].
Moreover, our findings confirm that low life satisfaction and a perception of loneliness could have a negative effect on good mental health status among immigrants in Italy. Indeed, our results seem to support the hypothesis that discriminatory experiences may affect mental health through stress responses, which explain part of the effect on MCS of exposure to S-PWD, as suggested by the indirect negative effect of loneliness and low life satisfaction on MCS.
Previous research found that perceived discrimination experiences may vary in relation to many contextual factors [28] as well as to other personal and economic resources [29]. Immigrants who experienced discrimination were most likely to report worsening self-reported mental health, with a higher risk of feelings of sadness, depression, and loneliness [30].
The workplace is a social context where discrimination is experienced due to limited access to certain types of jobs, bad relationships between workers and management, or to the characteristics of the job itself [11]. Not being valued and respected in the workplace, imbalanced job design, and occupational uncertainty may negatively affect mental health, as can interacting with individual personality characteristics, attitudes, and coping [9]. Workplace discrimination can be extremely stressful, especially among immigrant populations [27], who experience more difficulties in finding and changing jobs or obtaining more qualified positions, especially in these recent years of social and economic crisis [31].
Our findings suggest that also physical health status, measured through PCS index, is part of the pathway by which the experience of perceiving discrimination may be related to negative mental health outcomes, suggesting that perceived discrimination could be related also to negative health behaviours. Furthermore, the worse perceived mental health in people who had been in Italy longer than 10 years, similar to previous Canadian studies, showing a poorer mental health status among long-term immigrants than among recent immigrants [32, 33]. We also found that having lost one’s job (and therefore being unemployed at the time of the interview) may have negatively affected good mental health status among immigrants. The immigration process itself constitutes a pool of life goals and expectations from people who have decided to change their own life; achieving these goals can greatly influence overall life satisfaction [34, 35].
Strengths and limitations
The strength of this study is that it was conducted in Italy, where the first generation of immigrants still makes up most of the foreign population, which has been strongly affected by the economic crisis and which has been subjected to a concerning increase in xenophobic episodes. Italy is therefore an ideal setting for the study of the relationship between mental health and migration characteristics. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, there have been few studies in Southern Europe that have investigated the implications of perceived discrimination in the workplace [19–21, 36].
Our study also extended existing research by examining the independent effects of mental health on other factors strictly related to the perception of one’s life condition. In particular, we considered the potential role of some personal experiences (loneliness, level of life satisfaction) and self-perceived physical health in the association between discrimination and self-perceived mental health.
One possible limitation of this study is that cross-sectional data can make it difficult to discern causality in the association observed. However, theoretical perspectives support the idea that perceived discrimination adversely affects mental health outcomes [10].
Furthermore, this study relies exclusively on self-reporting. However, many of the current studies in this area involve perceptions of discriminatory treatment based on self-reporting of life events and personal experiences rather than on objectively observed discrimination [10]. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that self-perceived health is a reliable predictor of mortality [37], reason for which it has frequently been used as an outcome measure in numerous studies on immigrant health [38].