Late-life Asian immigrants managing wellness through contributing to socially embedded networks
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Date
4/09/2017
Open Access Location
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
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Abstract
New Zealand’s political, civic, health and social institutions have been
criticised as being ill-prepared to serve the health and social needs of the
country’s increasingly diverse ageing population. This grounded theory
study examined how late-life Asian immigrants participate in community
to influence their subjective health. Bilingual Chinese, Indian, and Korean
local intermediaries and research assistants were engaged as collaborative
research partners. Purposive recruitment, and later theoretical sampling,
were used to identify the 24 Chinese, 27 Indian, and 25 Korean
participants, aged 60-83, who were 1-19 years post-immigration. Data
were gathered through nine focus groups, and 15 individual interviews in
the participants’ language of choice. All data were recorded, transcribed
verbatim, and translated to English for analysis. Data analysis was done
using open coding, constant comparative analysis and dimensional
analysis. Strengthening community was the core social process in the
substantive theory developed. The participants actively advanced cultural
connectedness and gave service with, and for, each other. Over time, they
extended their focus toward doing so for the wider community. They
purposely used long-standing, occupation-related skills to resource how
they and their co-ethnic groups contributed to community health.
Additionally, they sought novel opportunities to diversify their
contributions. These late-life immigrants intentionally strove to stay
healthy through doing. Achieving collective, as well as personal, health
through community participation was for the sake of minimising potential
burdens on the country’s health system. The results indicate good health
promotion policies would aim to advance co-ethnic, socially embedded
networks for late-life Asian immigrants.
Description
Keywords
Asian health; Co-ethnic community; Community participation; Late-life immigrants; Subjective health
Citation
Journal of Occupational Science, 2017, pp. 1 - 15