'The healthy migrant effect' for mental health in England: propensity-score matched analysis using the EMPIRIC survey

Dhadda, Amrit and Greene, Giles ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9326-8740 2018. 'The healthy migrant effect' for mental health in England: propensity-score matched analysis using the EMPIRIC survey. Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health 20 , pp. 799-808. 10.1007/s10903-017-0570-z

Preview

PDF - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

Evidence has demonstrated that immigrants have a mental health advantage over the indigenous population of developed countries. However, much of the evidence-base demonstrating this mental health advantage is susceptible to confounding and inadequate adjustment across immigrant and non-immigrant groups preventing a rigorous assessment of a ’healthy migrant effect’. To compare the risk of common mental disorders in the immigrant population compared to the non-immigrant population in ethnic minority groups in England. A propensity-score matched analysis was carried out to adequately balance immigrant and non-immigrant groups for known confounders using the EMPIRIC national survey of Black-Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi groups. The mental health of participants was assessed using the validated Revised Clinical Interview Schedule tool. Immigrant participants were significantly less likely to have a common mental disorder than non-immigrant participants; OR = 0.47, (95% CI 0.40, 0.56). The results from this study demonstrate that a mental health advantage exists in ethnic minority immigrants compared to non-immigrants when balancing the two groups for confounding factors. This may be due to immigrants possessing certain personality traits, such as 'psychological hardiness', that the migration process may select for.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Medicine
Subjects:	R Medicine > R Medicine (General)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Immigrants, Healthy migrant effect, Mental health UK
Additional Information:	This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Publisher:	Springer Verlag (Germany)
ISSN:	1557-1912
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	9 May 2017
Date of Acceptance:	16 March 2017
Last Modified:	11 Oct 2023 19:09
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/100454

Citation Data

Cited 28 times in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item