Health Literacy Among Bhutanese Adult Refugees in the United States: The Sociocultural Approach

Abstract

<jats:p> Drawing on the accounts of literacy as socioculturally situated, this 2-year ethnography explores Bhutanese adult refugees’ health literacy at the intersection of their culture and experiences. This study illustrates the multifaceted relations between health literacy, culture, integration, and empowerment. This study indicates health literacy as sociocultural practice. Health literacy is mediated by Bhutanese adults’ oral tradition, language, education, and experiences over time. This study highlights health literacy as sociocultural participation—it resides in individuals’ community engagement. Rather than simply describing their limited functional health literacy as “a big problem,” this study recognizes Bhutanese adults’ ability to take action to improve personal and community health. This study challenges the deficit view rooted in adult literacy. It advocates integrating health literacy into adult literacy education to raise public awareness that health literacy promotes social justice, human rights, and world citizenship. Implications for a bottom-up approach to health literacy education are provided. </jats:p>

Accessing and navigating healthcare: A scoping review of the experiences of women of refugee background from Myanmar

“…For women of refugee background from Myanmar, health is a cultural construction. In their ethnographic study of people of refugee background from Bhutan resettled in the United States, Chao and Kang ( 2020 ) reported that health literacy is also a socio‐cultural concept, mediated by tradition, language and experiences and associated with community engagement. Similarly, this scoping review revealed that women of refugee background from Myanmar drew upon community resources to facilitate their healthcare access and navigation.…”

“…Salutogenic factors may be used to maintain or improve health and wellbeing. Collectivism has been recognised as a salutogenic factor in previous research on communities of refugee origin including those from Myanmar (Chao & Kang, 2020 ; Wong et al, 2020 ). Community education programs have been recommended to address misinformation, improve community health knowledge and health literacy, and address cultural stigmas (Chao & Kang, 2020 ; Frost, 2016 ; Kim et al, 2021 ; Schuster et al, 2019 ).…”

The importance of information acquisition to settlement services literacy for humanitarian migrants in Australia

“…Humanitarian migrants' experiences of fractured family and social networks negatively impacts on their access to information, especially in the initial phase of migration as they establish networks and acquire the language of the host country [20][21][22]. The negative effect of poor host language proficiency is compounded for humanitarian migrants who may not have strong literacy skills in their home language, have resided in refugee camps for extended periods of time, have little or no formal education, or have limited prior experience using modern technologies and information platforms [23,24]. In addition, the quality of available information post-migration is often inadequate to meet the information needs of humanitarian migrants, being culturally and linguistically inaccessible or inappropriate, or is overly reliant on digital literacy [25,26].…”

Refugee Family Health Brokers’ (FHBs’) Experiences with Health Care Providers: A Thematic Analysis

“…The government of Nepal was less than welcoming, as it was dealing with its own political and economic struggles, and confined the ethnic Nepalese from Bhutan to refugee camps in eastern Nepal, where they resided until Nepal and Bhutan finally agreed in 2006 on third-country resettlement, with ethnic Nepali Bhutanese being resettled in the United States, as well as in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, and Norway. Some 86,000 Bhutanese refugees have resettled in the United States since late 2007 [ 26 , 27 ].…”