For people who grew up in the United States, navigating health care can be complicated and intimidating, according to Sawsan Salah, a doctoral candidate in biobehavioral health at Penn State. Those complications may be magnified when a person is unfamiliar with the culture of medical care in the U.S. or does not speak English.
Salah, the child of U.S. immigrants, and her doctoral adviser, Lori Francis, professor of biobehavioral health, recently investigated how cultural and linguistic barriers affected the pediatric care received by the roughly three million children of immigrants in this country.
Using national survey data that measured whether immigrants felt their pediatricians collaborated on decisions about their children's health and the correlations between this communication and parents' perceptions of their children's health, the researchers found that immigrant parents were less likely than parents born in the U.S. to report shared decision making with their child's health care provider. The Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health recently published their study.
