Search results

This study aims to investigate the health-care-seeking behaviour and practices of West African migrants who reside and operate in Wa, Ghana, as itinerant retailers.

The study was cross-sectional and used the quantitative research approach. The analysis was done on a target population comprising 122 itinerant immigrant retail traders in Wa, Ghana. Fisher’s exact test and logistic regression were used to analyse the data.

Malaria was the commonest disease among them. Five in ten of the migrants preferred to report malaria episodes to a private health facility than to a government facility. Significant associations were identified between four dimensions (health facility, self-medication, home remedy and consult others) of health-seeking behaviour, and some background characteristics. The main reason why migrants prefer government health facilities was because of their better health personnel. They self-medicated because of easy accessibility of over-the-counter medicine shops. Also, when ill, the migrants usually consulted family members who would be in a position to take them home when their ailment worsens.

Snowball sampling was used to select the respondents which could potentially lead to a sample that is not fully representative of the population in general.

Studies concerning migration and health in Ghana have been focused on internal migrants. Yet, minority immigrant traders equally encounter adverse health conditions but limited studies have been conducted to espouse their health-seeking behaviour. This study imperatively contributes to the subject matter that has limited literature in the country.

Cancer discussion is perceived as a taboo subject among different cultures and societies including Africans. This perception has caused limited knowledge about the disease and prevented some from seeking early diagnosis and treatment. With West Africans now living in western societies where cancer is openly discussed, this study aims to explore how black Africans perceive the disease and the implications for healthcare.

Five focus groups of 53 persons from Ghanaian and Nigerian migrant communities in Luton participated in this study.

Perceptions of fear, shame and denial were identified as key elements of how people perceive and react to cancer among the study population.

Secrecy and apprehension were identified as major barriers and have prevented some from adequately accessing and utilizing cancer facilities in the country. The feelings of fear, secrecy and stigma associated with the disease across different ethnic groups, cultures and nations also exist among the study population. These outcomes are similar and chime with published findings of limited cancer perception research among other ethnic groups and races here in the UK and across the globe.

The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the multi-ethnic marketplace as the site of the emergence of service nepotism: the practice where employees bestow relational benefits and/or gifts on customers on the basis that they share a perceived common socio-collective identity. The authors draw on the contemporary turn to practice in social theory to explore why ethnic employees may engage in service nepotism even when they are aware that it contravenes organizational policy.

Given the paucity of empirical research which investigates the multi-ethnic marketplace as a locus for the emergence of service nepotism, the authors adopted an exploratory qualitative research approach to advance insight into service nepotism. The study benefits from its empirical focus on West African migrants in the UK who represent a distinct minority group living in urban areas of the developed world. Data for the study were collected over a six-month period, utilizing semi-structured interviews as the primary method of data collection.

The research highlights the occurrence and complexities of service nepotism in the multi-ethnic marketplace, and identifies four distinct activities (marginal revolution, reciprocal altruism, pandering for recognition, and horizontal comradeship), that motivate ethnic employees to engage in service nepotism, despite their awareness that this conflicts with organizational policy.

By virtue of the chosen theoretical lens, the authors were unable to demonstrate how service nepotism could be observed outside spoken language. Also, care should be taken in generalizing the findings from this study given the particularities of the sub-group involved. For example, since the study is based on a small sample of first generation migrants, the findings may not hold true for their offspring, whose socialization and marketplace experiences may be qualitatively different from those of their parents.

Service nepotism challenges fundamental western egalitarian ideals in the multi-ethnic marketplace. Organizations may wish to develop strategies to placate observers’ concerns of creeping favouritism in a supposedly equitable marketplace. The research could also serve as a starting point for managers objectively to assess the likely impact of service nepotism on the organizing value systems and competitiveness. In particular, the authors suggest that international marketing managers would do well to look beneath the surface to see what is really going on in international marketplaces, since ostensible experiences of marketplace consumption may not always reflect underlying reality.

By using service nepotism as an analytical category to explore the marketplace experiences of ethnic service employees living and working in industrialized societies, the research shows that the practice of service nepotism, whilst taken for granted, can have far-reaching impact on individuals, observers, and service organizations in an increasingly highly differentiated multi-ethnic society.

The literature has acknowledged the importance of diaspora studies because of the influx of funds into the local economy, including the tourism and hospitality sector. However, little empirical research appears to be known about the subject matter, principally within the developing country perspective. This study aims to respond to research calls by investigating the impact of diasporic cultural heritage, family heritage on travel preference of West African Indian migrant visitors to their homeland.

This research is guided by the theory of acculturation. A quantitative data were gathered from a sample of 312 diasporas, and the regression analysis was used to analyze the data.

The study finds that cultural heritage and family heritage have positive and significant impact on travel preference of migrant visitors to their homeland. Further analysis of the independent sample t-test reveals a significant difference between Indian Ghanaians and Ghanaian Indians in their thought of cultural heritage. However, no significant differences were found in the Indian Ghanaian and Ghanaian Indian’s family heritage and travel preference to their homeland.

This study is destination-specific of Indian migrant visitors. The application of the study’s outcome to other diaspora would demand a larger sample size for generalization to be made. The study offers compelling insights on cultural heritage, family heritage and travel preference to marketing a diaspora tourism site.

The study expands the application of the theory of acculturation within the diaspora literature and establishes that integration and separation strategies of the theory explain the positive interests of the migrant visitors’ traveling preference to their homeland.

The purpose of this paper is to report a real-life empirical case and discuss some caveats emerged in measuring subjective well-being (SWB) in an understudied population of adolescents refugees from West Africa.

During the process of translation and cultural adaptation of the subjective well-being assessment scale in the target population, the model of measurement presented some weakness with regard to content validity criteria.

This leads to a partial revision of the model and the development of new locally-based domains of SWB.

Context-specific factors’ robustness showed the dynamic and culture-informed nature of the SWB construct. Practical and theoretical implications of using quantitative questionnaires in non-western contexts characterized by high grades of insecurity and instability will be discussed.

This study aims to explore the internal migration experiences and health/well-being issues of 38 girls and women working as Kayayei (head-porters) in Accra, Ghana.

Data were collected from seven focus group interview sessions, and thematic analysis was used to analyse the data.

The results revealed the geographic, structural and family issues that promote increased migration of females to the cities. The findings betray the potential negative effects of migration on the participants’ quality of life, including accessing health services. They also suggest that the Kayayei phenomenon is a significant child protection, health/well-being concern yet to be given adequate attention in ways that consider the implications of such large internal migration of females on the overall human resource development capacities of rural communities.

This is an original study with data collected to explore internal rural to urban migration and its effect on health and well-being of young girls and women.

Though female labour force participation (FLFP) rates have been widely analysed across countries, the analysis of migrant women's participation has been consistently ignored in the literature. The few studies that have been conducted concentrate largely on sociological and anthropological aspects of migrant women (see Foner (1976)). This article will investigate immigrant FLFP rates, which are generally found to be different from their counterparts in the immigrants' country of origin. To evaluate the immigrant FLFP rate we analyse and quantify the nature and significance of its various demographic, socio‐economic and cultural determinants.

This study aims to explore and discuss the ethical challenges that the authors encountered in the SWIPSER project, a study about the well-being of West-African women who work in the red-light district in Brussels.

The study was commissioned by the municipality of Schaerbeek and executed by a Nigerian–Belgian research team. Data were collected using a multi-method qualitative approach, predominantly through ethnographic fieldwork that consisted of detailed observations, informal interviews (with 38 participants), complemented by document analysis and stakeholder interviews.

The study presents the main ethical dilemmas in four themes: (1) representing diversity, i.e. how do we get access to all members of a migrant community that is inherently hierarchical?; (2) in the margin, i.e. how can we conduct research with undocumented migrants and what do we do when faced with violence and injustice?; (3) attraction and repulsion, i.e. what ethical consequences are involved when working in a multi-ethnic research team?; and (4) unveiling secrets, i.e. which ethical challenges are we faced with when presenting the results of research on vulnerable migrant communities?

This study goes beyond procedural research ethics and highlights the specific relational ethics (related to the relation between research(er) and participant) and the socio-political ethics (related to the relation between the research(er) and the socio-political context) involved in qualitative research with female migrants who work in prostitution.

The purpose of this paper is to examine migrants working as inter‐cultural mediators at the interface of the formal and informal economies in southern Italy so as to question the conventional representation of knowledge workers.

Ethnographic evidence collected between September 2004 and July 2005 is presented of the knowledge work of these precarious non‐European Union migrants in Naples, Italy.

This paper displays the need to consider alternative forms of knowledge work and knowledge worker that are central to the globalizing economy. Migration and difference and their resulting social realities are seen as central features of contemporary economic change. Depicting the creative, flexible, problem‐solving aspects of intercultural mediators who work with undocumented and documented migrants in the Naples area, this paper shows how these African migrant mediators make use of their full repertoire of formally trained knowledge and more centrally their social, tacit, experiential and embodied knowledge intimately linked with their Africanness and self‐awareness of their precarious migrant status to gain the trust of other Africans. In fact, their flexibility in the face of changing circumstances and their manipulation, reading and negotiation of cultural codes depending on circumstances reveals a flexible, enterprising style suited to the challenges of the knowledge economy.

It displays how current conceptualisations of the knowledge economy and knowledge worker in contemporary advanced economies need considerable revision to include other types of migrant normally excluded from discussions.

This is one of the first attempts to display the relationship between knowledge workers, immigrants and the informal economy.