Finding employment is an important aspect of the integration of refugees into their receiving society. In the Netherlands, some local authorities invite recently settled refugees to complete an online psychological assessment aimed at supporting their integration into Dutch society. By combining these data with time-lagged employment data retrieved from the Statistics Office of the Netherlands, we examined the extent to which certain individual-difference characteristics predict workforce participation among Syrian (n = 1867) and Eritrean (n = 844) refugees in the Netherlands. These characteristics were categorized as human and social capital characteristics. Workforce participation was operationalized as not only having a paid job or not, but also the longest period of time that one has stayed in a single position, and the highest hourly wage that one has earned since their arrival in the country. The results showed that several human capital characteristics (i.e., pre-migration educational level, pre-migration work experience, and local language proficiency) and one social capital characteristic (i.e., contact with natives) contributed to predicting one or more of these employment outcomes. There were some differences in the predictive validity of these characteristics between refugee groups (i.e., based on age, sex, and nationality).
Currently, a second study is being conducted to investigate the effect of neighbourhood characteristics on various integration outcomes for refugees (n = 4556) , over and above individual difference characteristics. The random manner in which many refugees in the Netherlands were housed allows for a quasi-experimental design, excluding variance from confounding factors that would ordinarily be related to personal choice of neighbourhood. Once results have been obtained in the fourth quarter of 2025, they may prove to be a valuable addition to this presentation.