cover image: The health behaviours of immigrants and native-born people in Canada

Premium

20.500.12592/0909xh

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

28 Apr 2006

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 behaviours that are strongly associated with current and future health. [...] With the influence of the majority native-born lifestyle, immigrants gradually adopt ‘Western’ habits and lifestyle in terms of 2 A companion paper (McDonald and Kennedy, 2005) examines the incidence of overweight and obesity among immigrant and native-born Canadians. [...] One outcome in some of the research on the healthy immigrant effect is that the inclusion of variables reflecting health behaviours as explanatory variables does not appear to have a large effect on the magnitude of the initial health gap or on the convergence in health to native born levels (for Canada, see e.g., Perez, 2002 and Ng et.al, 2005). [...] 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). [...] The final set of control variables from the main regressions illustrate the presence of significant provincial variation for men and women, even after controlling for demographic and socio-economic differences, residence in a CMA, other urban, or rural area, and the presence of immigrants and visible minorities.
health education politics school obesity canada acculturation demography diet immigrants medicine social sciences university health behavior behavior emigrants and immigrants further education census geographic units of canada alcoholic drink binge drinking dummy variable (statistics) drink hispanic paradox

Authors

McDonald, James Ted

Pages
41
Published in
Canada

Related Topics

All