Analytical Results of Interviews and Survey Questionnaires on the Stages of Integration of the African Diaspora in Italy

This study investigates the integration of the African diaspora in Italy through a stage-based framework that conceptualises integration as a dynamic, multidimensional, and non-linear process. While existing scholarship has predominantly examined integration through legal, economic, or socio-cultural indicators, this research argues that migrants’ experiences evolve across interconnected stages encompassing liminality, adaptation, mediation, hybridisation, awareness, and inclusion. By applying this framework to the Italian context, the study offers a more nuanced understanding of how structural conditions, institutional support, and migrants’ agency interact throughout the integration process. The research employs a qualitative case study design combining participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and survey questionnaires administered to thirty African migrants residing in reception centres and urban communities across Western Sicily between 2022 and 2023. Additional perspectives were obtained from students and a Senegalese football player whose experience of racial discrimination illustrates the broader social dynamics influencing integration. The findings demonstrate that integration is characterised by uneven progress across its stages. While participants reported substantial advances in language acquisition, access to healthcare, public participation, and the development of resilient intra-community support networks, these achievements coexist with persistent barriers, including insecure residence status, racial discrimination, limited awareness of institutional integration programmes, housing precarity, and restricted interaction with the host society. These findings challenge linear conceptions of integration by revealing the simultaneous coexistence of inclusion and exclusion within migrants’ lived experiences. The study contributes to migration and diaspora scholarship by advancing a stage-based analytical model that captures the complexity of integration beyond conventional socio-economic indicators. It further argues that sustainable integration requires coordinated policies addressing legal security, institutional accessibility, intercultural engagement, and long-term social inclusion.