Disentangling Mental Health, Immigrant Adaptation, and Selection: A Natural Experiment Approach

Mark VanLandingham, Tulane University
Hongyun Fu, Tulane University

International migration is associated with a wide range of negative mental health outcomes among Southeast Asian immigrants to the U.S. The inherent stress of adapting to an especially foreign environment appears implicated; and it is widely held that successful adaptation (or acculturation) to the new setting will moderate these links between stress and poor mental health outcomes. A central problem with this paradigm is that the data employed to evaluate it often come from clinic populations; and nearly always consist of post-migration measures of outcomes and predictors, which beg the role of pre-migration attributes. Our approach to this dilemma is to employ a “natural experiment” research design, which involves comparisons of a wide range of mental health outcomes for three population-based samples of Vietnamese immigrants, never-leavers, and returnees. A central focus is the effect of social network, acculturation, and selection factors on several key dimensions of immigrant mental health.