A Meta-Analysis of Social and Contextual Correlates of Migrant Adaptation to Living in Receiving Societies

Article https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-67468-z A Meta-Analysis of Social and Contextual Correlates of Migrant Adaptation to Living in Receiving Societies Received: 21 November 2024 Check for updates 1234567890():,; 1234567890():,; Accepted: 2 December 2025 Kinga Bierwiaczonek 1,2,3 , Dinh H. Vu 3, Rongtian Tong 4, Mike W.-L. Cheung 5, Nora C. G. Benningstad 3, Evita van Duin6, Karine Lindholm3,7, Colleen Ward 8 & Jonas R. Kunst 9 International migration has been consistently rising in modern times, and understanding what factors are associated with the successful inclusion of migrants is urgent. This meta-analysis helps pinpoint such factors by identifying the most robust social and contextual correlates of successful migrant adaptation to living in the receiving societies. Here, we meta-analyze 5,066 effects from 1,114 primary studies among 571,260 first-generation migrants, international students, business expatriates, and refugees. We show that migrant adaptation is most strongly negatively associated with the presence of stressors, especially acculturative stressors and perceived discrimination, and positively with the availability of social resources, especially feelings of connectedness with the social context and not feeling lonely. The role of variables related to culture learning, namely exposure to social groups within the new culture, and the distance between the new culture and one’s heritage culture, was more limited. This pattern was found across the different migrant groups. The number of international migrants, broadly defined as people living in a country different from their country of birth, has been consistently rising decade after decade in modern times. This trend has been especially pronounced over the past 20 years, with an increase from 173 million international migrants in 2000 to record levels of 270 million in 20201. Scientists and stakeholders agree that to maximize the benefits of this global megatrend, understanding what psychosocial factors are associated with the successful and equitable inclusion of migrants is a matter of highest urgency2,3. Well-adapted migrants have better educational achievement4,5, better work outcomes6–9, higher capacity to behaviorally and cognitively fit into the receiving culture10, and are overall more satisfied with their lives in the receiving country11. Given these social outcomes, the increase in worldwide migration has been accompanied by an exponential growth of studies on migrant acculturation and adaptation across various fields such as psychology, cultural studies and anthropology, organizational studies, communication studies, and sociology. The number of published studies on acculturation per year has been six times greater in the recent years (e.g., over 1200 studies in 2019) than in the beginning of the century (e.g., about 200 studies in 2001)12. While the sheer volume of research in this field might suggest that the factors crucial for migrants’ adaptation are well understood, the body of literature is beset by inconsistent results and challenges in replication13–16. This situation blurs the state of knowledge and undermines its applied value for a topic of critical societal relevance. Here, we address this issue by presenting a comprehensive preregistered multi-level meta-analysis, analyzing data from 1114 primary studies and 5066 effects on migrant adaptation, covering 571,260 first-generation migrant participants arriving from 73 countries and residing in 64 countries. Pertaining to the broader theoretical frameworks of acculturation2,17,18 and intercultural contact11, cross-cultural adaptation involves psychological and socio-cultural dimensions. Psychological 1 Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID), Trier, Germany. 2Trier University, Trier, Germany. 3University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway. 4University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA. 5National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore. 6Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium. 7Norwegian Police University College, Oslo, Norway. 8 Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand. 9BI Norwegian Business School, Oslo, Norway. e-mail: Nature Communications | (2025)16:11231 1 Article adaptation is acquired in a stress and coping process, involving dealing with the stressful elements of an intercultural transition. It is manifested in outcomes such as feelings of well-being and satisfaction when residing in the receiving culture. The psychological dimension of adaptation is broadly believed to be affected by two groups of factors: stressors related to migration (e.g., language barriers, discrimination experiences, decreases in social status post-migration) and resources that facilitate coping with these stressors (e.g., positive social interactions, friendships, diverse forms of social and organizational support). By contrast, socio-cultural adaptation is acquired in a culture learning process, involving learning culture-specific norms, meanings, and behavioral skills. It manifests as being able to ‘fit into’ the new culture. The culture learning process behind socio-cultural adaptation is believed to be influenced by factors related to social learning (i.e., learning via exposure to the receiving society, such as through social interactions with receiving country nationals, but also co-nationals or individuals from other migrant groups) and learning generalization (i.e., being able to generalize culture-specific behaviors and knowledge acquired in one context to another cultural context, which depends, among others, on the degree of cultural distance, that is, dissimilarity between the receiving and heritage cultures)11,19. Cross-cultural adaptation theory proposes a long list of potential correlates of the two dimensions of adaptation, generally hypothesized to facilitate or hinder their underlying stress-and-coping and culture learning processes. While research on these correlates is extensive, empirical support for their relevance is inconsistent, and some of them may not be backed by solid evidence. Perhaps the most prominent example is the acculturation strategy of integration (i.e., an orientation toward both the migrant’s heritage culture and the receiving culture). Long seen as a critical predictor of good adaptation2,17,20, integration was recently revealed to have modest and highly heterogeneous associations with adaptation14,15, triggering an ongoing debate on the practical relevance of this correlate16–18,21. This underscores the necessity of examining how robust the correlates put forward by the broader literature really are. To complicate the picture even more, primary research on adaptation is scattered across several scientific fields with diverging theoretical assumptions and interests, often focusing on only one migrant population which, however, is rarely clearly delineated empirically (e.g., international students, migrants, expatriates, refugees)13. Despite offering focused and critical insights on specific factor (...truncated)