Milli mála - 2023, Blaðsíða 120
120 Milli mála 15/2/2023
PREDICTORS OF SATISFACTION / DISSATISFACTION WITH ICELANDIC LANGUAGE
COURSE AND ICELANDIC PROFICIENCY AMONG ADULT IMMIGRANTS IN ICELAND
Asia, Africa, Central America, South America, and “other” regions,
we merged them into one category for further analysis. Table 1 shows
the demographics of the sample by gender, age, and origin.
There were 1% (N=21) answers in Arabic, 35% (N=669) in
English, 8% (N=153) in Icelandic, 3% (N=60) in Latvian, 2% (N=48)
in Lithuanian, 50% (N=976) in Polish, and 0.4% (N=7) in Thai. In
the sample, 48% (N=926) resided outside of the capital area, while
52% (N=1008) lived in the capital area, including the capital
Reykjavík and six municipalities around it.
Table 1: Demographics of the sample by gender, age, and origin.
Gender female male
Age >40 26–40 18–25 >40 26–40 18–25
Western Europe, Nordic
countries, or North America
81 181 42 33 76 9
Central or Eastern Europe 183 500 105 152 288 59
Asia 32 17 9 4 17 7
Africa 10 4 3 6 4 0
Central America 1 0 1 0 0 0
South America 4 2 7 0 2 0
Other 18 10 5 1 10 0
Most participants in the survey were highly educated. More specific-
ally, 3% (N=63) had completed primary school, 13% (N=244) had
vocational training, 31% (N=599) had a matriculation exam, 48%
(N=931) had completed a university degree, and 5% (N=97) did not
fit into any of those categories. It should be noted that we merged
participants who did not indicate their educational level or indicated
that they did not know into the category “other.” Furthermore, for
the purpose of further analysis, we merged the categories “vocational
training” and “primary school.”
The distribution of duration of stay is shown in Figure 1. Most
participants were in Iceland for more than 2 years, which confirms
that they had enough time to take language courses and experience
life in Iceland. In order to avoid small group sizes, we merged all
participants with a stay of longer than 10 years into one group and
all with a stay of up to two years into one group.
10.33112/millimala.15.2.5