Abstract
Objectives: Adolescents in multicultural families (AMFs) are exposed to numerous stressors and face environmental vulnerability within the family, school, and community systems, which may affect their health and well-being. Concrete discussion on policies is lacking due to insufficient data on the levels of well-being of AMFs in South Korea. This study aimed to investigate social-cultural and community factors affecting their well-being.Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted with a convenience sample of 206 AMFs (aged 13–18 years) from 16 general schools and three multicultural schools across eight large cities. AMFs completed a self-administrative questionnaire assessing well-being, individual factors (acculturative stress, health behavior), social and community factors (social support, sense of community), and environmental factors (school type, economic status). Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.Results: Social support and sense of community significantly and directly affected well-being. The economic status and type of school had an indirect effect on well-being, whereas the effect of acculturative stress was not significant. Factors significantly affecting adolescents' well-being were social support, sense of community, economic status, and type of school.Conclusion: Addressing well-being may be the strategy leading AMFs to grow into healthy adults. These results could help educators, health professionals, and policymakers to identify ways to enhance the well-being of AMFs.
Highlights
Social determinants of health (SDH) lead to the difference in health outcomes depending on the distribution of capital, power, and resources [1], which are highlighted as the sources of health disparities in populations
Based on the model proposed by Dahlgren and Whitehead [2] and our systematic review of the literature, we classify the SDH affecting the well-being of adolescents in multicultural families (AMF) into individual, social and community network, and environmental factors
This study shows the relationship between how AMFs experience the SDH in the contexts of family, school, and community surrounding their daily lives and their well-being
Summary
Social determinants of health (SDH) lead to the difference in health outcomes depending on the distribution of capital, power, and resources [1], which are highlighted as the sources of health disparities in populations. SDH are defined as broad social and economic conditions that determine the quality of individual health outcomes [2]. The population of multicultural families consisting of a marriage immigrant or foreigner with Korean citizenship,have been growing at a rapid pace in South Korea since 2000. The number of adolescents in multicultural families (AMFs) was about 122,2000 in 2018 in South Korea and tends to continuously increase annually [3]. AMFs have demonstrated a lower subjective well-being than the native Korean youth. According to the Youth Health Behavior Web-based Survey in 2013 [4], only 56.3% of AMFs reported subjective happiness, 34.5% experienced depression, and 19.8% had suicidal ideation [5]. AMFs faced daily discrimination, acculturation stress, psychological maladjustment, parent-child conflict, bullying, and the tendency to drop out of school [5, 6]
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