Bilingual Women Research Articles

Minority ethnic women and cervical screening: a matter of action or research?

Concerns over low uptake of cervical screening among minority ethnic women have spurred much research and practical activity to address the problem. Due to theoretical and methodological dife culties, research in this area has tended to focus on the communication dee cit of women, without addressing the social context. This has not only hindered a wider theoretical understanding of the problem but, also, has perpetuated ineffective health promotion practice in this area. Using a participatory action research (PAR) approach, the project ‘ Woman-to-woman: promoting cervical screening to minority ethnic women in primary care’ , tackled the problem by involving both health professionals and women from the communities. Working in partnership, both professional and lay participants identie ed the problems from their own perspectives and generated solutions to resolve them. An intervention strategy was formulated in which bilingual women from the communities were recruited as community health educators to provide an informed link between their respective communities and the primary care sector. The outcomes of the intervention were evaluated by all participants. This paper aims to introduce PAR as an alternative approach by presenting an overview of the study. It begins by highlighting some of the common theoretical and methodological problems encountered by researchers; and then introduces the research framework of PAR and describes the research processes. A case observation is presented to illustrate the depth of understanding of the screening processes that can be obtained using this approach. The project has demonstrated that applying PAR cannot only lead to meaningful discoveries and insights into the problem of minority ethnic women and cervical screening, but also change in health promotion practice, which would have been dife cult to achieve using a conventional research model. However, this study has also revealed major limitations of PAR, which need to be addressed if the approach is to be further developed.

BILINGUAL MEN BUT NOT WOMEN DISPLAY LESS LEFT EAR BUT NOT RIGHT EAR ACCURACY DURING DICHOTIC LISTENING COMPARED TO MONOLINGUALS

Thirty monolingual university men and women and 33 bilingual university men and women who had learned English after 5 years of age were administered Roberts Dichotic Word Listening Test. The bilingual men committed twice the numbers of errors for words presented to the left ear but not to the right ear or to both ears when compared to the bilingual women, the monolingual men, or the monolingual women. The latter three groups did not differ significantly from each other. This interaction between sex and language history explained about 16% of the variance in the numbers of errors for the left ear. The results are related to other studies that showed men who acquired English after the age of 5 years exhibited a relative weakness for verbal memory but not for figural memory compared to bilingual women or monolingual men and women. Implications for the relative accuracies of verbal memory are considered.

Gender and Language Contact Research in the Australian Context

The focus of this paper is a (re)consideration of explanations and (re)presentation of second-generation bilingual women and their discourses of identities, language choice and language maintenance in Australia in the light of new directions for gender in language contact research. Here we present a (re)view of the value, roles and directions of past and present research about gender and language contact as well as provide an example for future directions through an examination of the emergent discourses of identity of a young Australian-born woman of Greek parentage living in Melbourne.

Towards Evidence-Based Health Promotion and Service Provision for New Migrants to Australia

Objectives. To examine patterns of health utilization and health information dissemination among immigrants to Australia in the first 6 months of immigration using data from the Longitudinal Study of Immigrants to Australia (LSIA). Methods. The population for the LSIA consists of 5178 principal applicants making their first arrival to Australia on a migrant visa between 1 September 1993 and 31 August 1995, inclusive, and who are aged 15 years or over at the time (96% of all principal applicants). The influence of immigration category, country of birth, health status and age on the likelihood of receiving information about health, sources of health information and use of general practitioners were explored using separate logistic regressions for men and women. Results. Women who received health information were older and less likely to have a chronic illness than women who did not. Men who received health information were older and more likely to be in the Business visa category. Younger women, those in Preferential Family visa categories and bilingual women were more likely than other women to have received health information from an NGO. For men, the only significant predictor of source of health information was being in the Independent visa category. Women who used health services were younger, more likely to have a chronic illness, be proficient in English and less likely to be in the Independent visa category than women who did not. Men who used health services were older, more likely to have a chronic condition and have limited English than men who did not. Men who used health services were more likely to be in the Humanitarian visa class and less likely to be in the Concessional Family or Business visa categories than men who did not use health services. They were also more likely to have been born in Oceania, Middle East and North Africa and Africa. Conclusions. The results of this study indicate that there are important differentials in knowledge of and use of the health system and these differences are unlikely to be captured by using measures based on ethnicity or country of origin alone. Predictors of health service utilization were different for men and women. In particular, age and lack of English proficiency appeared to be barriers to health service use for women. Visa category and country of birth were more important determinants of health service use for men.

Language mixing in bilingual speakers with Alzheimer's dementia: a conversation analysis approach

Bilingual speakers with Alzheimer s disease (AD) may use the wrong language for the setting interlocutor or produce what appears to be an inappropriate mixture of their two languages. The few published studies to date examining this phenomenon have investigated it within a discourse analysis framework, interpreting the behaviour either as a problem of language choice (choosing the appropriate language in which to converse) or language separation (keeping two languages separate in production). These authors contend that while such a distinction is theoretically feasible, it is extremely problematic to apply these labels to actual conversational data. Using examples from free conversations of four bilingual women with AD, some of the difficulties inherent in a discourse analytic approach to this question are illustrated. Applying principles from conversation analysis (CA) it is argued that a methodology that is data driven and context relevant offers more valuable insights into individuals language use and interaction. It avoids the inconclusiveness of the choice-separation dichotomy and offersmore constructive accounts of whether and how language behaviour is appropriate or not.

Bilingual Women: Anthropological Approaches to Second Language Use.; Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self.; Feminist Stylistics.

Bilingual Women: Anthropological Approaches to Second Language Use. Pauline Burton. Ketaki Kushari Dyson and Shirley Ardener. eds. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1994. 198 pp.Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self. Kira Hall and Mary Bucholtz. eds. New York: Routledge, 1995. 512 pp.Feminist Stylistics. Sara Mills. New York: Routledge, 1995. 230 pp.

New Voices in Academia? The Regulative Nature of Academic Writing Conventions

The opening up of higher education in Britain to groups previously excluded means that there is currently an opportunity for new voices to be heard in academia. However, the process whereby dominant academic linguistic conventions and practices mediate such voices is highly problematic, tending to constrain rather than open up the possibilities for meaning making. This paper examines specific instances in the struggle to make meaning in academic writing of a group of black bilingual women. Using case study material I focus firstly on the process whereby practices surrounding dominant conventions exclude them from participating in the liberal-conservative education project of higher education as currently organised in Britain. Secondly, I explore how such conventions constrain what they can say in their academic writing and thus how their voices are regulated. This involves examining how conventions regulate what they can say, how they can say it and who they can be. I conclude that there is a need to listen carefully to what student writers are saying in order to open up the framework for making meaning in higher education if our aim is to develop an inclusive education where new voices can be heard.

Gender and Ethnicity as Factors in the Development of Verbal Skills in Bilingual Mexican American Women

This study describes and analyzes differences in student output across ethnicity and gender in a mixed monolingual English and bilingual Spanish/English class in order to understand how L2 oral language skills are developed in a mixed classroom. Primary participants in the study included approximately 30 basic writing students ranging in age from 18 to 60. Fifty-five percent of the students were bilingual Mexican American, and the remainder were monolingual Anglo Americans. Participant observation, informal interviews, and audio-tape classroom and tutorial interaction provide the data for this classroom ethnography. Data were analyzed to discover patterns of student output in various interfactional contexts and to discover how the structure and content of interaction influenced these patterns. The analysis revealed that bilingual Mexican American students spoke significantly less in whole class interaction than monolingual Anglo American students. Moreover, an analysis by gender revealed that Mexican American men contributed four times the amount expected, whereas Mexican American women spoke half as much as expected. In other interfactional contexts, however, the bilingual women were quite verbal. The social status of Mexican American women as “double minorities” and negative attitudes toward Spanish/English bilingual help explain why the Mexican American women alone responded to whole class interaction with silence.

Reliability of a Greek Translation of the Life Satisfaction Index

Scores on a Greek translation of the Life Satisfaction Index were correlated .95 with scores on the English version for a sample of 36 bilingual Greek university women. The internal reliability of the Greek translation was estimated by a coefficient alpha of .78. Scores were significantly correlated -.51 with those on a previously published Greek translation of the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale and -.37 with Social loneliness and -.40 with Emotional loneliness. This same pattern of correlations was found when the English version of these two tests was completed by university men and women in the USA. We concluded, therefore, the Greek translation of the Life Satisfaction Index is sufficiently reliable to warrant further use in research in Greece.

Language usage and fertility in the Mexican-origin population of the United States

This article examines the effects of English proficiency and female education on cumulative and recent fertility within the Mexican-origin population in the U.S. To ascertain whether the cultural or the human capital aspects of linguistic variables have the greater salience for fertility behavior, fertility patterns of bilingual women are compared with those of monolingual women speaking English or Spanish. Using the 1980 U.S. Census 5 percent Public Use Microdata Sample for ever-married Mexican-origin women aged 15-44, we find that for almost all age cohorts, the effects of English proficiency are negative and increase with rising education. The strength of the interaction is greater in younger age groups. Greater English proficiency is also associated with a more negative impact of education for native- than foreign-born women. Overall, the influence of "opportunity cost," as opposed to cultural factors, is more important in shaping the fertility behavior of these women.

A Comparison of English and Spanish (Nunez) Translation of the MMPI

As more Hispanics seek help in mental health centers, the need arises for a reliable Spanish translation of the MMPI. This present research is a preliminary attempt to study the validity of the Nuñez translation of the MMPI, the translation most widely used in Latin America. This translation and the English MMPI were administered to a volunteer sample of 18 teenaged bilingual Hispanic women. A split-plot factorial ANOVA with one between-subjects factor(form of test) was used to analyze the K-corrected T scorns from each scale separately. On scales F, K, Hs, Pa,.and Sc, the Spanish means were significantly (p < .05) higher than the English means. Order of administration had no significant effect, and there was no significant interaction effect. These findings demonstrate that the Nuñez translation cannot be used interchangeably with the English form of the MMPI.