A Systematic Review of Questionnaires Measuring the Health of Resettling Refugee Women

Abstract

Because many ethnically diverse refugee women resettle in industrialized countries, several biopsychosocial factors need to be considered in caring for them. This systematic review of studies conducted with female refugees, asylum-seekers, or "unspecified" immigrants based on six electronic databases was conducted to determine which questionnaires best measure relevant variables. Questionnaires were reviewed for measurement properties, application of translation theory, and quality of representation. Studies must have included > or = 1 measure of the following: general health; torture, abuse, sex-and-gender-based violence (SGBV); depression; stress; posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD); anxiety; somatization; migration history; social support; socioeconomic status; discrimination; or mother-child interactions. Fifty-six studies using 47 questionnaires were identified; only five had strong evidence for use with resettling refugee women. Thus, few high-quality tools are available to measure concepts relevant to resettling refugee women's health.

The Assessment of Complementary and Alternative Medicine Use Among Individuals with HIV: A Systematic Review and Recommendations for Future Research

“…Though prior systematic reviews have not evaluated intercoder reliability at the study inclusion stage (only at the article coding stage), 30,31 there has been a recent call for researchers to assess intercoder reliability at both stages. 32,33 Therefore, the second author reviewed a randomly selected subsample of the 151 abstracts (approximately 20%; N = 30) to evaluate intercoder reliability for study inclusion.…”

Review of Refugee Mental Health Assessment: Best Practices and Recommendations

“…Despite the limitations to this review, its findings are not inimical to, and are possibly more encouraging than, the findings of the other large-scale reviews by Gagnon, Tuck, and Barkun (2004) and Hollifield et al (2002), albeit that their assessment briefs were limited more to women's health and mental health trauma respectively. Neither of those reviews concluded that there was much advantage in extending their brief to the crosscultural literature generally as a way of identifying assessment tools that had cultural comparability and statistical rigour for application with persons from refugee backgrounds.…”

“…That is, studies were selected for analysis only if they specifically involved development of a new instrument for use with refugee clients or adaptation or restandardisation of an existing instrument for that purpose. The review, therefore, differed from the earlier reviews of Hollifield et al (2002) and Gagnon et al (2004) because it deliberately excluded studies (a) that reported on the analysis of measures designed generally for crosscultural use and (b) where the reported analysis of the properties of a measure was incidental to the main purpose of the study.…”

“…Previous reviews suggest that development or adaptation of clinical assessment instruments specifically for use with refugees is limited (Gagnon, Tuck, & Barkun, 2004;Hollifield et al, 2002). In the first of these largescale reviews, Hollifield et al (2002) reviewed literature on measures of refugee trauma and health status contained in six large online databases.…”

The Survey on Women’s Health in China

“…[2]. The variables included general health, history of chronic disease, physical disability, gynecological disease, prenatal care, cervical screening of smear, breast cancer screening, cesarean delivery, induced abortion, and genderbased violence.…”