Listening to Chinese Immigrant Restaurant Workers in the Midwest: Application of the Culture-Centered Approach (CCA) to Explore Perceptions of Health and Health Care

Abstract

This study engages with the culture-centered approach (CCA) to explore Chinese immigrant restaurant workers' perception of the U.S. health care system and their interactions with the health care system in interpreting meanings of health. Chinese restaurant workers are marginalized because of their struggles on the job, their immigrant identity, and their negotiations with the structural contexts of occupation, migration status, and culture. In-depth interviews were conducted with 18 Chinese immigrant restaurant workers that lasted an average of 1.5 hours each, and were audiotaped. Interviews with participants highlighted critical issues in access to health care and the struggles experienced by restaurant workers in securing access to health, understood in the context of work. Critical to the workers' discourse is the acknowledgment of structural constraints such as lack of insurance coverage, immigration status, and lack of understanding of how the U.S. health care system works.

Migration and Health in the Construction Industry: Culturally Centering Voices of Bangladeshi Workers in Singapore

“…Also, the participant narratives attend to the role of power in the realm of workplace injuries and health seeking [4,15,16,28]. For instance, the power of the employer in controlling health care resources shapes the experiences of participants with seeking out healthcare after the injury, access medical leave, and secure compensation.…”

“…Adding to a growing body of literature on immigration and health communication grounded in the tenets of the CCA [15,19,24,27,28], this article highlights the role of work as a defining feature of migrant health amid neoliberal flows of labour. Health is constituted in the vulnerabilities of/at work, connected to features of everyday living.…”

“…For instance, dominant articulations of migrant labour to be strategically managed through efficiency, awareness, and effective management of workplaces [25,26,27,28] is shifted into the hands of migrant workers, who point toward the necessity for creating opportunities of articulation that offer contractual migrant workers modes of access to addressing the health threats they experience, and opportunities for meaningfully participating in platforms that enable their articulations to be heard in ways that matter [28,29,30]. The interplays of culture, structure, and agency depict the ways in which workers enact their agency by drawing on cultural stories, situated amid the structures of construction work.…”

“…Conceptualizing culture as dynamic, fragmented, and ever-transforming, the CCA foregrounds meanings as entry points for the constructions of health and wellbeing [15,24,25,26]. The CCA proposes that cultural contexts are anchors for understanding how health risks are understood, how they are made sense of, and the ways in which they are negotiated by community members [27,28,29,30]. Based on a dialogic approach to culture and community life, it suggests that the theorizing of health needs to be embedded within sense-making processes of local communities, developing entry points for solutions to health risks that are embedded in the everyday negotiations of structures, resources, and contexts [17].…”

Health disparities: Using policies to rethink our strategies for eliminating the impact of food deserts by focusing on unhealthy dietary patterns

“…Food is also a symbol of pride for communities. Many ethnicities open their own restaurants and serve traditional dishes within their community because it operates as an expression of their cultural identity (Gao, Dutta, & Okoror, ). The same could be said for corner stores.…”