Mental Health of Youth in Korean Immigrant Families

Park, Yong Chon; Noh, Samuel

Abstract

OBJECTIVES
Understanding the well-being of immigrant adolescents is complicated due to the empirical data showing poorer psychological and behavioral adjustment in native-born second generation immigrant children to those of foreign-born immigrant children. Some researchers argue the phenomenon of "healthy immigrant effect". This research is to examine the valicity of such effect.
METHODS
The immigrant sample for this study was drawn from the pool of families involved in the Korean Mental Health Study (Noh et al, 1992) in the Metro area of Toronto. Of the 860 families, 318 Korean adolescents participated in this study. Immigrant control and Canadian control samples participated in the same survey. ANOVA and MCA were used for the statistical analysis.
RESULTS
The self reported depression in Korean sample was slightly higher than the controls. The self reported anxiety level is slightly higher in Korean than the controls. The self-reported instrumental and social competence were lower among Korean youth compared to the foreign-born and Canadian-born controls.
CONCLUSION
The data are not consistent with the "healthy immigrant effect". A serious design issue in the studies of national data comparing immigrant children is that the impact of immigration on mental health can not be estimated accurately by comparing minority children of varying nativity status to children born in the host country. With close matching of the samples, we found that immigrant children do not have an advantage over their non-immigrant cohort.