Cultural distance and emotional problems among immigrant and refugee youth in Canada: Findings from the New Canadian Child and Youth Study (NCCYS)

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Abstract

This study examines the widely accepted but under-studied proposition that the greater the cultural distance (CD) between home country and country of resettlement the greater the mental health risk for immigrant and refugee youth. The study also explores pathways through which CD, a macro-social stressor, might exert its mental health effect through meso-environmental stressors including poverty and discrimination, as well as micro-environmental familial stressors. Acculturation strategies and personal competencies are also examined as sources of resilience. The study sample consists of 2074 immigrant and refugee girls and boys, ages 11–13, belonging to 16 different ethnocultural communities, and living in six different Canadian cities. Study data consist of interviews with youth and with the parent deemed the most knowledgeable. Results reveal that CD did adversely affect youth mental health but the effect was relatively small. Family environment variables, particularly parental depression and harsh parenting, accounted for about one third of the effect of CD. Parents in ethnocultural communities that were culturally distant from Canada were more likely to employ harsh parenting practices than parents coming from culturally closer countries. Immigrant youth from culturally distant backgrounds were more likely to perceive discrimination than youth from culturally closer backgrounds. Social competence had an inverse relationship with emotional symptoms. An integration style of acculturation was more advantageous than an isolated, assimilated or marginalized style. The longer youth from culturally distant backgrounds lived in Canada, the worse their mental health tended to be: for youth from culturally closer backgrounds, the opposite was true. The discussion addresses implications for resettlement interventions and policy.

Section snippets

Societal cultures: Concepts and measures

Parsons (1968) was one of the earliest writers to propose that underlying pattern values could account for cross-societal differences in the behavior of institutions and individuals. More recently, Schwartz (2014) has expanded the concept. According to Schwartz, the concept of societal culture does not mean that there is consensus among all individuals belonging to a particular society. In fact, survey research demonstrates that responses to questions about values (e.g. Hofstede, 1980,

Predictors of mental health among immigrant youth: Macro-, meso- micro-stressors, and personal sources of resilience

The current study draws on Bronfenbrenner's (2005) bioecological approach to human development and the Total Environment Assessment Model for Early Child Development (TEAM-ECD; Siddiqi, Hertzman, Irwin, & Hertzman, 2011). The concept that systems at varying degrees of proximity to the individual affect behaviour and development both uniquely and in interaction with each other is common to both models and is an essential feature of the current study's conceptual framework. According to this

CD

The number of distinct cultural value dimensions most popularly used in research ranges from two to nine but there is considerable overlap among them (Schwartz, 2011). A superordinate factor called Traditionalism versus Secularism, derived from the World Values Survey (Inglehart & Welzel, 2011), is particularly appropriate for a study of CD and mental health. One end of this dimension describes a value orientation supporting intellectual freedom, equality of opportunity, tolerance and

Meso-level predictors: Poverty and discrimination

Poverty jeopardizes youth mental health (Elder et al., 1985, Ponnet, 2014, Schor and Menaghan, 1995) and families new to Canada tend to be poor. According to at least one study, almost one third of immigrant families present in Canada for ten years or less lives in deep poverty (Beiser, Hou, Hyman, & Tousignant, 2002). Fig. 1 links CD to poverty because research suggests that high CD is related to unemployment (Lundborg, 2013) as well as compromised job performance (Harvey & Moeller, 2009). It

Micro-environment: The family

Previous research (Beiser et al., 2002, Ponnet, 2014) demonstrates that the effect of poverty may be accounted for, in part, by its adverse effects on the family environment. In comparison with immigrant families originating in countries culturally similar to Canada, families from culturally distant origins can be expected to experience more resettlement stress arising from language problems, isolation and discrimination. Resettlement stress may give rise to harsh parenting, parental emotional

Personal resilience

Personal factors, including self-esteem and acculturation strategies help determine the mental health impact of stressful circumstance (Spencer, 1995, Spencer, 2008).

Sometimes thought of as synonymous with, or else a component of mental health, self-esteem is, on the contrary, both conceptually distinguishable and distinctively important. For example, self-esteem is a significant predictor of well-being over the life-course (Orth & Robins, 2014) as well as a mediating pathway between ethnic

Control variables

Like age and gender, years of residence in a receiving country is routinely included as a control variable in immigration studies. Some research, based on the so-called “healthy immigrant” paradigm (e.g. Ali, 2002) suggests that, at arrival, immigrants enjoy better mental health than the native-born but that, with increasing length of residence, the immigrant advantage deteriorates. Other studies (Beiser, 1999, Beiser et al., 2014) suggest the opposite. No research to date has explored a

Study framework and hypotheses

The aim of the current study is to examine the proposition that cultural distance (based on the difference between an objective measure of home and resettlement country adherence to Traditionalism versus Secularism) has an adverse effect on the mental health of immigrant and refugee youth and to investigate societal, sociopsychological and personal factors affecting this relationship. Hypotheses derived from the model in Fig. 1 include:

  • 1.

    High CD will be associated with elevated levels of

Methods

Immigrant and refugee youth taking part in the study had either been born outside Canada or were living with at least one foreign-born parent who had immigrated to Canada during the 10 years preceding the study's inception. Since most immigrants settle in cities (Statistics Canada, 2008a, Statistics Canada, 2008b) samples were recruited from Canada's six major urban areas—Montreal, Quebec; Toronto, Ontario; Winnipeg, Manitoba; Calgary, Alberta; Edmonton, Alberta; and Vancouver, British

Sampling

The current study utilizes data from an NCCYS inception cohort of immigrant and refugee youth (ages 11–13) belonging to 16 different ethnocultural groups. The 16 different ethnocultural group design helped ensure the inclusion of important small groups such as refugees and recently arrived small immigrant communities who have little chance of showing up in probability-based population samples. The ethnocultural groups included Hong Kong Chinese, Mainland Chinese, Filipino, Ethiopian, Somali,

Study procedures

Data sources for the current report include the Parent about Family (PAF), Parent about Child (PAC), Child about Child (CAC) and Child Identity (CID) questionnaires. The PAF and PAC, administered in more than 95 percent of cases to a participating youth's mother, elicit information about parents’ ethnic and religious backgrounds, education, labor force activity, income, health status, parenting behaviors, and pre-and post-migration stressors. The CAC elicits self-reports about symptoms and

Emotional problems (EP)

Emotional problems (EP), an eight-item self-report symptom scale appearing on the CAC, was adapted from the Ontario Child Health Survey (Statistics Canada, 1995) and previously used by the first author (MB) in studies of aboriginal children and youth (Dion, Gotowiec, & Beiser, 1998). Each EP item has three forced choice responses: (1) never or not true, (2) sometimes or sometimes true, and (3) often or very true. Sample items include: How often would you say you (a) are unhappy, sad or

Control variables

Since adaptation improves with increasing length of residence (Berry et al., 2006), length of time in Canada was included along with age and gender.

Data analysis

The research team used T-tests to examine differences between the small and large CD groups, followed by a hierarchical multiple regression analysis to examine the study's theoretical models. For Model 1, Emotional Problems was regressed on CD, Model 2 added sociodemographic (age, gender and length of residence in Canada) and socio-environmental predictors (poverty and resettlement stress), and Model 3 added family environment. Model 4 added youth stress and resilience variables. Three

Results

Table 1 examines bivariate relationships between cultural distance and the study dependent and independent variables.

Youth in the large CD group had higher scores on Emotional Problems than youth in the small CD condition. There were no age, gender or income differences between the groups but the large CD group tended to have been in Canada longer than the small CD group. Youth in the high CD condition perceived more discrimination than youth in the low CD condition. The large CD families were

Discussion

A large difference between culture of origin and the culture of Canada had a negative impact on immigrant youth mental health. A considerable amount of that impact appears to have been mediated through associated resettlement stress and its impact on familial functioning—harsh parenting and parental depression in particular. The final model accounted for approximately 23 percent of the total variance in youth scores on EP.

The total variance in EP scores is similar to what other investigators

Acknowledgments

This paper is a product of the New Canadian Children and Youth Study (Principal Investigators: Morton Beiser, Robert Armstrong, David Este, Anne George, Linda Ogilvie, Jacqueline Oxman-Martinez, Joanna Anneke Rummens, Lori Wilkinson), a national longitudinal survey of the health and well-being of more than 4000 newcomer immigrant and refugee children living in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver. The NCCYS is a joint collaboration between university researchers

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