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Canadian HIV/AIDS researchers, service providers and policy-makers are faced with new challenges of providing effective and inclusive care that meets the needs of the changing populations infected with and affected by HIV. Since 2005 immigrants and refugees from ethno-racial minority communities have comprised close to 20 percent of all new HIV infections in Canada. Anecdotes shared by PLWHAs and service providers indicated that mental health challenges faced by newcomer PLWHAs was a priority concern for HIV prevention, treatment and care. This paper reports on the results of an exploratory study, which examined the complex factors that influence the mental health of immigrants and refugees living with HIV/AIDS (IR-PLWHAs).

This exploratory study is informed by a critical social science paradigm, which acknowledges that the everyday reality is shaped by interlocking systems of social processes and unequal power relations. The paper used a qualitative interpretative design and focus groups to explore the intersecting effects of living with HIV/AIDS, migration and settlement, and HIV stigma and discrimination on the mental health of IR-PLWHAs.

The paper found that in addition to social and economic marginalization, IR-PLWHAs experienced multiple stressors associated with their HIV status: neurocognitive and physical impairments, HIV stigma and discrimination, and fear of deportation. The paper also found that the experiences of stigma and discrimination among IR-PLWHAs were complex and contextual, closely linked to their social positions defined by the intersecting dimensions of race, class, gender, citizenship, sexualities, body norms, and HIV status. The paper concludes that effective HIV prevention, treatment and care, and mental health promotion in newcomer and ethno-racial minority communities must consider the bio-psycho-social connections of different stressors and the interlocking systems of oppression faced by IR-PLWHAs.

This study was exploratory in nature with a small number of participants who were recruited through AIDS organizations in Toronto. Consequently, the recruitment strategy may reach only those who were connected to the AIDS organizations. The paper believes that IR-PLWHAs who were not connected to the AIDS organizations might experience even more social exclusion and marginalization. These factors may limit the transferability of this study.

This is the first study that explores the bio-psycho-social connections and intersecting determinants of mental health among immigrants and refugees living with HIV and AIDS in Canada. The results of this study contribute to cross-sector dialogue among practitioners and researchers in the HIV/AIDS, mental health, and immigration and settlement services sectors.

The purpose of this paper is to explore if and how community organizations providing services to late-in-life Punjabi immigrants in British Columbia, Canada, offer services with the potential to promote their mental health or well-being. The authors also wanted to know how Punjabi seniors perceived available services and if they supported their mental well-being.

To guide the research, the authors used the VicHealth Framework, which identifies three overarching social and economic determinants of mental health: social inclusion (SI), freedom from violence and discrimination, and access to economic resources and participation. This mixed methods study combines descriptive survey and qualitative focus group data with input from Punjabi seniors and community service providers.

All three mental health determinants were identified as important by service providers and seniors, with SI as the most important. Family dynamics (shaped by migration and sponsorship status) influence all three determinants and can promote or diminish mental well-being.

The pilot study is limited in sample size and scope and further inquiry with different groups of immigrant older adults is warranted.

Service providers assert that more outreach and sustainable funding are needed to reach the majority of potential beneficiaries unable to participate in community programmes. Information on mental well-being of seniors should be targeted at both seniors and their families.

The VicHealth Framework provided a unique lens through which to explore the contributions of community organizations to mental health promotion for immigrant older adults.

This paper aims to compare the health status of Roma in Europe and Aborigines in Australia, examining access to health care (both primary and long‐term), administrative and communication problems, environmental risks associated with location of residences, women's health, substance abuse and mental health.

The paper discusses issues generated by cultural practices by both health care providers and the target groups.

Both Roma and Australian Aborigines have significantly poorer health status than the majority of the societies they are embedded in, and are clearly amongst the most disadvantaged members of their respective societies. Nevertheless, affirmative action programs for Aboriginal people over the last 40 years have produced some significant changes, with Aboriginal doctors and nurses, and culturally appropriate service provision being found in many areas.

Although there are considerable similarities between the health status and situation of Romanies and Australian Aborigines, clearly, there are also substantive differences. The paper suggests possible culturally appropriate service provision for Roma, based on Australian Aboriginal experiences and models.

The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on intersectionality and ascertain its potential for application to human resources (HR) research and practice. Particular attention is paid to its methodological issues involving how best to incorporate intersectionality into research designs, and its data issues involving the “curse of dimensionality” where there are too few observations in most datasets to deal with multiple intersecting categories.

The methodology involves reviewing the literature on intersectionality in its various dimensions: its conceptual underpinnings and meanings; its evolution as a concept; its application in various areas; its relationship to gender-based analysis plus (GBA+); its methodological issues and data requirements; its relationship to theory and qualitative as well as quantitative lines of research; and its potential applicability to research and practice in HR.

Intersectionality deals with how interdependent categories such as race, gender and disability intersect to affect outcomes. It is not how each of these factors has an independent or additive effect; rather, it is how they combine together in an interlocking fashion to have an interactive effect that is different from the sum of their individual effects. This gives rise to methodological and data complications that are outlined. Ways in which these complications have been dealt with in the literature are outlined, including interaction effects, separate equations for key groups, reducing data requirements, qualitative analysis and machine learning with Big Data.

Intersectionality has not been dealt with in HR research or practice. In other fields, it tends to be dealt with only in a conceptual/theoretical fashion or qualitatively, likely reflecting the difficulties of applying it to quantitative research.

The wide gap between the theoretical concept of intersectionality and its practical application for purposes of prediction as well as causal analysis is outlined. Trade-offs are invariably involved in applying intersectionality to HR issues. Practical steps for dealing with those trade-offs in the quantitative analyses of HR issues are outlined.

Intersectionality draws attention to the intersecting nature of multiple disadvantages or vulnerability. It highlights how they interact in a multiplicative and not simply additive fashion to affect various outcomes of individual and social importance.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first analysis of the potential applicability of the concept of intersectionality to research and practice in HR. It has obvious relevance for ascertaining intersectional categories as predictors and causal determinants of important outcomes in HR, especially given the growing availability of large personnel and digital datasets.

The purpose of this paper is to provide qualitative evidence from the experience of Chinese service users in the UK to expand the literature on the use of intersectionality analysis in research on the mental health of ethnic minority groups.

Repeated in-depth life-history interviews were carried out with 22 participants. Interviews were analysed using the constant comparative method.

Four areas of life are identified for their possible negative impact on mental health for this minority group: labour market and work conditions, marriage and family, education, and ageing. The findings illustrate how these intersecting variables may shape the social conditions this ethnic minority group face. For this ethnic minority group in the UK, inequalities can intersect at national as well as transnational level.

This paper highlights how power relations and structural inequalities including class, gender, age and ethnicity could be drawn upon to understand the interplay of determinants of mental health for ethnic minority groups. As the multi-factorial social forces are closely related to the emergence of poor mental health, it is suggested that interventions to reduce mental health problems in ethnic minority communities should be multi-level and not limited to individualised service responses.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the salient barriers in the uptake and effective utilization of health promotion interventions among ethnocultural minority older adults (EMOA).

The paper opted for a literature review of 25 sources (peer-reviewed articles as well as documents from the grey literature). The search was primarily conducted in a database developed during a scoping review on the health and health care access and utilization of EMOA. Emphasis was placed on older ethnocultural minorities in Canada; however examples from the UK (which has a comparable health care system) and the USA and Australia (which have large, ethnically diverse populations) were also selected. The Candidacy framework was used as an analytical lens in the review.

Findings indicate that health promotion needs to be understood as comprehensive care, involving not only the provision of health care services, but also knowledge dissemination and the facilitation of access to these services. Limited health literacy, low levels of self-efficacy and autonomy, and diverse life course experiences, particularly in the case of immigrant older adults, give rise to issues around the identification of need and system navigation. Cultural beliefs on health and illness, particularly around diet and exercise, and a lack of trust in formal systems of health care, are barriers to the uptake of interventions. Similarly, service permeability is low when cultural competency is lacking.

The recommendations include the need for collaborative engagement with stakeholders, including family, peers, community partners and health practitioners, and the development of concise, culturally, and linguistically appropriate tools of health promotion that are targeted toward the intersecting needs of individuals in this diverse population of older adults.

Given the increasingly diverse nature of the older adult population in Canada over the past four decades, this paper makes an important contribution toward understanding the social, cultural, structural, biographical, and geographical factors that may optimize the effective dissemination and uptake of health promotion interventions among EMOA.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the use of intersectionality theory in research with gender and sexual minorities – that is, with lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) people, and lesser-studied groups such as two-spirited people.

First, the paper note the limited way that LGBTQ research has taken up issues of intersecting oppression. The paper outlines why theoretical and methodological attention to overlapping oppressions is important, and why theorists of intersectionality have identified the additive model as inadequate. The paper presents a sketch of current best practices for intersectional research, notes special issues for intersectional research arising within qualitative and quantitative paradigms, and finishes with an overview of how these issues are taken up in this special issue of Ethnicity and Inequalities in Health and Social Care.

Current best practices for intersectional research include. Bringing a critical political lens to data analyses; contextualizing findings in light of systemic oppressions; strategically using both additive and multivariate regression models; and bringing a conscious awareness of the limitations of current methods to our analyses.

This paper addresses the use of intersectionality theory in research with gender and sexual minorities, highlighting methodological issues associated with qualitative and quantitative paradigms in LGBTQ research.

The purpose of this paper is to describe Karen refugee women’s experience of resettlement and the factors which structured community capacity to support their mental health and well-being.

A postcolonial and feminist standpoint was used to bring Karen women’s voice to the knowledge production process. Data were collected through ethnographic field observation, in-depth semi-structured individual and focus group interviews with Karen women as well as healthcare and social service providers.

Three interrelated themes emerged from the data: Karen women’s construction of mental health as “stress and worry”; gender, language and health literacy intersected, shaping Karen women’s access to health care and social resources; flexible partnerships between settlement agencies, primary care and public health promoted community capacity but were challenged by neoliberalism.

Karen women and families are a diverse group with a unique historical context. Not all the findings are applicable across refugee women.

This paper highlights the social determinants of mental health for Karen women and community responses for mitigating psychological distress during resettlement.

Public health policy requires a contextualized understanding of refugee women’s mental health. Health promotion in resettlement must include culturally safe provision of health care to mitigate sources of psychological distress during resettlement.

This research brings a postcolonial and feminist analysis to community capacity as a public health strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the role of the Mental Health Act (MHA) 1983 in safeguarding adults at risk of abuse and neglect. The author has undertaken a thematic review of Safeguarding Adults Reviews (SARs) commissioned in England and Adult Practice Reviews (APRs) commissioned in Wales where the MHA 1983 was a central aspect to the review.

Reviews were included based on specific determinants, following analysis of SARs, APRs and executive summaries. This should not affect the credibility of the research, as themes were identified in conjunction with analysis of literature regarding use of the MHA in the context of adult safeguarding. Consequently, this review has been underpinned by evidence-based research in the area of study.

The interaction between statutes, such as the MHA 1983 and Care Act 2014, signify challenges to professionals, with variable application of mental health legislation in practice.

Lack of a complete national repository for review reports means that it is likely that the data set analysis is incomplete. It was noted that limitations to this research include the fact that Safeguarding Adults Boards in England may not publish SAR reports or may choose to publish an executive summary or practice brief instead of the full SAR report, therefore limiting the scope of disseminating learning from SARs, as this is difficult to achieve where the full report has not been published. The author aimed to mitigate this by undertaking comprehensive searches of Local Authority and SAB websites, in addition to submitting Information requests to ensure that this research encompassed as many relevant review reports as possible.

This is an important and timely topic for debate, given that the UK Government is proposing reform of the MHA 1983. In addition, existing thematic reviews of SARS tend to be generalised, rather than specifically focused on the MHA.

Intersectionality theory is a social justice theory customarily employed to address inequities which arise in the academic or legal arenas as it relates to race and gender. The application of intersectionality theory extends beyond the convergence of multiple social identities. It provides an invaluable framework to examine the convergence of social identities, the social determinants of health and a global pandemic in communities of historically marginalized and underrepresented persons. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the disparities experienced by African American and Latinx persons using the principles of intersectionality theory as the schema.

A literature review was performed on the scholarly articles examining the disproportionate incidence and mortality rates of African Americans and Latinx persons in America.

The current literature confirms that the disparities which existed prior to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic have been magnified by systemic oppression and racism of historically marginalized and underrepresented persons in America. The coronavirus pandemic has spotlighted the disparities in sustainable employment and access to health care for African American and Latinx persons.

Employing a social justice theoretical framework of intersectionality provides an opportunity to examine the lived experiences of African American and Latinx persons without race/ethnicity being the primary focal point. Future research will illustrate the urgent need for public health policy reform to eradicate the disparities experienced by African American and Latinx populations.