Social support of undocumented immigrants in Malta : adaptive transfer of good practices to a challenging context

Abstract

The aim of this research is to identify and examine good practices in the social support of undocumented immigrants exercised during integration, while exploring how these were and could be adapted to the Maltese context. The study adopted critical realism as a paradigm, with the focus being on structure and agency. Structure mainly points to local authorities and organisations that are active in the fields of social support. Agency refers to service providers, but also immigrants who choose to adapt to these contextual features. To better understand context and adaptations, the author took Dr Charles Pace’s Adaptive Remodelling for Congruence framework in order to investigate the service provider and user worlds. For the former we analysed country policies, the organisations and their service designs, including face-to-face practices. For the latter, we determined immigrants’ culture, their living settings and patterns, and family or friends. The identification of contextual features is crucial in the addressing of mismatches or gaps by means of context-sensitive-adaptations. To check if our adaptations could be considered good practices, they were analysed against Prof Charles Watters’ Six Dimensions of Good Practice Criteria, namely access and entitlement, users’ participation, holistic practices, interagency collaboration, cultural sensitivity and evaluation. To further understand the application of these concepts of adaptation and good practice, the author carried out two visits to good practice centres in Italy, with these thus serving as case studies. The study used a mixed method research approach, as it was considered the most appropriate to explore these phenomena. The primary data was collected in two phases. First, one-to-one meetings with service providers, and secondly, sessions with immigrants that took the form of focus/interview groups. The samples consisted, respectively, of 13 service providers and 15 immigrants, familiar with the fields of social support. The service providers first answered statements in a closed-ended manner, within a quantitative approach. In its qualitative aspect, the rating scale also allowed for open-ended questions that probed for richer data, thus expanding the closed-ended answers through open-ended comments. Moreover, to further dig beneath the surface, immigrants were interviewed in three groups by means of a semi-structured interview guide. Both the rating scale and interview guide were constructed by the author, by merging the frameworks of Pace and Watters. Descriptive statistical analysis was carried out for quantitative data, whilst the qualitative data was analysed using thematic analysis. The aspects under review are relatively new in Malta, particularly how service designs adapted to the social support of undocumented immigrants during the integration process. This research contributed to knowledge by focusing on how service providers, coming from both public mainstream services and migrant-specialised organisations, adapted or could adapt their service designs to help immigrants during the integration process, despite a context that was considered new and challenging. Nevertheless, immigrants proved to be agents of adaptation in their own right, choosing to adapt either as a response to structural inadequacies or to meet their own needs during integration. Research participants and the author gave their recommendations to further help and support immigrants particularly during their passage from segregation to integration and inclusion.