Biography |
Current Research |
Selected Publications |
Teaching/Taught
Current Research
My research contributes to many of the important areas in culture and mental health research: cultural analyses of psychiatric epidemiology; the integration of cultural syndromes into psychiatric epidemiology and clinical research; family caregiving for a relative with serious mental illness; and cultural competence in mental health services. To carry out this research program, I employ a creative tension between in-depth, ethnographic studies of individuals in a family context and broader community and national studies employing epidemiological approaches. My newest research projects are the reconceptualization of acculturation in health and mental health research and work on health and health care issues among Mexican immigrants.
Research in Psychiatric Epidemiology
My research in psychiatric epidemiology has been widely influential and frequently cited in bolstering the need for cultural insights in the design and interpretation of studies of Latino mental health in the U.S. While it has been widely accepted by anthropologists that culture significantly shapes both the experience and expression of emotional distress and influences responses to standard psychiatric symptom scales and psychiatric interviews, it took a sophisticated, sustained research program to empirically demonstrate the centrality of culture to epidemiologists and other public health researchers.
The best known and most developed aspect of my work has been research on ataques de nervios among Latinos in the U.S. and Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico. I developed an on-going collaboration with the Behavioral Sciences Research Institute, a multi-disciplinary research program at the University of Puerto Rico Medical School which is an internationally recognized center for psychiatric epidemiology research, to carry out a full-fledged program of research integrating anthropology and epidemiology. This program has identified ataques de nervios as a prominent idiom of distress among Puerto Ricans reflecting both social distress and psychiatric disorder; has re-associated this experience with its appropriate cultural label rather than the stigmatizing term "Puerto Rican Syndrome" by which the experience had been known in psychiatry since the 1960's; and has established the importance of understanding ataques de nervios on their own terms as well as providing insights for relating this experience to psychiatric disorder. Ataques de nervios were included in the "Glossary of Culture-Bound Syndromes" in DSM-IV and updated information will be included in DSM-V.
My current research examines mental health among Latino individuals in the U.S. and in Puerto Rico as part of the National Latino and Asian American (NLAAS) mental health study funded by National Institute of Mental Health.
Health and Health Care of Mexican Immigrants
I am also actively involved in a project entitled Transnational New Brunswick that brings together faculty and students from Rutgers University with members of the Mexican (Oaxacan) community in New Brunswick for a series of research seminars and community action activities. This program is co-organized with Lazos America Unida, a Mexican community advocacy organization.
Through my research and applied activities, I examine the social and cultural sources of health and distress among Latinos and work to develop interventions to improve the health of Latino and other under-served communities. I have carried out preliminary research on dietary change among Mexican immigrants from the state of Oaxaca. This work involved focus groups with Mexican immigrants in New Brunswick, NJ and focus groups with people from their home communities in Mexico. These results were presented at the "Health Across Borders II" conference that I organized. Participants included university researchers from Rutgers, community health activists from New Brunswick, and researchers and policy makers from the State University System of Oaxaca (SUNEO) and the Mexican Secretariat of Health.
I am extending these efforts this summer with an International Service Learning Program on "Community Health in Oaxaca, Mexico." This Study Abroad Program will bring students from Rutgers and other universities to Oaxaca to learn about the health issues that people in this economically disadvantaged state in Mexico face and how this serves as one of the push factors in leading to people migrating to the United States.
What Makes Acculturation Successful?
In the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, the United States has been experiencing large scale and continuing immigration of people from around the world, but particularly Latin America and Asia. Estimates are that by 2020, 15% of the U.S. population will be foreign born, surpassing the impacts of immigration on the U.S. at the turn of the 20th Century. This makes understanding processes of acculturation and their relation to successful social adjustment, especially educational attainment, critical issues.
This newest project is in the process of development and I have submitted a proposal to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to fund his work. This study focuses on resilience factors among immigrant children and their families that promote the ability of immigrant youth to succeed in this important developmental transition. The project involves a study of immigrant students who have entered Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, to delineate the key processes of adaptation and adjustment that immigrant youth and their families go through to successfully negotiate life in the United States. The study will employ focus groups with 200 immigrant students to understand in-depth their experiences of adaptation and adjustment to U.S. society and the factors that helped them successfully attain college admission. A final product of the study will be the identification of key items for a new acculturation measure.
