A scoping review of literature on labour market integration of newly arrived refugees in Norway. Report from a systematic literature search

Abstract

This systematic scoping review explores and summarizes the body of literature in both English and Norwegian published between 2015 to August 2019 on the topic of labour market integration of refugees in Norway. The review is centred upon the research question “What research have been done about labour market integration of recently arrived refugees in Norway?” During the process, a protocol was designed and followed. Over two hundred articles were initially identified through systematic searches on databases using specific keywords strings, then screened by two different reviewers. Based on a set of inclusion criteria to assess their relevance to the research topic, 87 of them are subsequently selected in this scoping review, which comprises a collection of 51 articles from 28 English and Norwegian academic journals, 17 postgraduate theses from 11 Norwegian universities, and 16 other books and reports from municipalities, reputable publishers and research institutions. This review offers a descriptive analysis of this identified body of literature, including the distribution of articles in Norwegian and English, their topics, research methods, data sources, and types of publication to show the current trend observed in this defined field in the Norwegian context. The report also includes an introduction to the method of systematic literature review and documents the process of conducting this scoping review. The major findings about the patterns in most recent research on the labour market integration of refugees in Norway are as follows: • Only one-fifth of the articles are written in English, the rest are in Norwegian • Most of the included literature are about the introduction programme at the national level or in international comparisons; about one-fifth are studies at municipal level. • There is strong and sustained interest in studies about the outcomes of measures or the administration of the introduction programme, but only about a quarter of them involves interviews with refugees. • Other themes that interest researchers include the roles of civil society and personal networks in integration processes, and the experience and outcomes of female refugees and other immigrants.