Research Projects

Joint with E. Barbiano di Belgiojoso, S. Rimoldi, A. Avellone and D. Pescini

Empirical studies show that recently arrived migrants have a better health profile than natives. However, migrants’ health generally gets worse over the life course, a pattern known as ‘unhealthy assimilation’. Our study aims at both enhancing the knowledge on immigrants’ health inequalities in Italy and testing the use of a mobile app as a data collection tool.

We aim at collecting original information on immigrants’ self-assessed health status and access to health care by distributing short surveys through the mobile app “ComeStai”. The main questionnaire (4 minutes) will be presented when first opening the app. Afterwards, the user can access an in-app platform that provides comprehensive information on health services. Every two months, the app displays a follow-up survey (1 minute).

This data collection method allows to reach segments of the population that are typically under-covered by official statistics, such as undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers. Moreover, mobile apps can conveniently collect longitudinal data by tracking respondents over time. Finally, it is possible to passively track users’ navigation patterns within the app. On the other hand, such method does not allow for the construction of a sampling strategy beforehand, may entail a higher enrolment effort compared to online surveys and may be subject to high respondents’ dropouts over time. We aim at testing such features by conducting a pilot study in one Italian region, Lombardy. The collected data will be used to investigate differential health outcomes, both within the immigrant population and comparing immigrants with natives.

[Funded by Fondazione Cariplo]

Joint with P. Maneuvrier Hervieu and A. Jeannet

The aim of this study is to investigate the influence of regional decline on the public’s support for democracy, focusing on the meso-level social context. We explore two possible mechanisms which underlie this relationship: 1) individuals are materially motivated by the decline in their local economic conditions or 2) individuals feel a symbolic sense of loss due to living in a place where industrial work is no longer the predominant mode of economic and social life. We empirically test our hypotheses by exploiting the spatial and time variation in deindustrialization at the regional level (NUTS-2) across 10 Western European countries.

[ERC funded]

You can find here my PhD Thesis and my Defense slides.