The health behaviors of immigrants and native-born people in Canada

Further, the determination of factors that contribute to good health at migration and the subsequent deterioration of immigrant health over time can yield valuable lessons about how the health and well-being of all of the recipient country’s residents could be improved. [...] The objective of this paper is to provide new insights into some of the factors that might underpin the apparent deterioration in immigrants’ physical health with years in Canada on arrival in their new country and over time, by documenting and analyzing the incidence of a range of behaviors that are strongly associated with current and future health. [...] The data used in the paper are drawn from the 1996 wave of the NPHS and the 2000-01 and 2002-03 waves of the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS). [...] To test the influence of majority health behavior on minority and immigrant choices, additional variables are included in the regressions that measure the incidence of the relevant health behavior of the gender-specific white native-born population in each 7 See McDonald and Kennedy (2004) for further discussion of the comparability of these two data surveys. [...] Log-odds ratios are interpreted as the ratio of the odds of a person with a particular characteristic engaging in the behavior to the odds of a person without the particular characteristic engaging in the behavior.