This study aims to examine how the migration experience influences newcomer mothers’ young child feeding and care practices and their children’s overall health. The thesis comprises three separate manuscripts, each of which examines one of the three intermediate determinants of the nutritional status of young children (UNICEF 1990): access to healthcare, household food insecurity, and child feeding and care practices. The research was conducted in Toronto’s Jane-Finch neighbourhood, a suburban neighbourhood home to a high density of newcomers. Thirty-two participants (16 Sri Lankan Tamil and 16 Latin American) who had migrated to Canada within the past five years as refugee claimants or family sponsored immigrants participated in the study. Data collection consisted of semi-structured interviews with women from low-income households who had a child between the ages of 1 and 5 years. Spanish and Tamil speaking interviewers interviewed each participant two or three times. Data was analyzed using a mid-level approach in which broad analytical themes are determined prior to analysis and specific themes were then generated based on participants’ perspectives and are grounded in the data.
The first manuscript examines newcomer mothers’ experiences accessing physicians for their children and identifies the major gaps between mothers’ expectations and their actual experiences that lead to barriers in communication and overall patient dissatisfaction. The second manuscript demonstrates that mothers’ past experiences with food insecurity affect two aspects of the construct of food insecurity: its managed aspect and its temporal nature. This finding has implications for the measurement of food insecurity in newcomer populations. The third manuscript reveals that newcomer mothers are exposed to several parallel and often conflicting systems of knowledge concerning health and nutrition for their children, and that their utilization of Canada’s Food Guide is impeded by its failure to acknowledge alternate parallel knowledge systems. These findings can be applied to the development of social and health policy aimed at improving cultural competency in healthcare and nutrition education and at ameliorating the income constraints leading to household food insecurity.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/65633 |
| Date | 16 July 2014 |
| Creators | Anderson, Laura |
| Contributors | Sellen, Daniel |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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