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J Immigrant Minority Health (2014) 16:11571166 DOI 10.1007/s10903-013-9920-7
ORIGINAL PAPER
Discrimination and Psychiatric Disorder Among Asian American Immigrants: A National Analysis by Subgroups
Miao Li
Published online: 29 September 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract Although considerable evidence suggests that discrimination negatively affects mental health for Asian American (AA) immigrants, few studies have disaggre-gated this heterogeneous community and/or differentiated effects of different forms of discrimination. Using the rst nationally representative data on AA immigrants in US, this study examines whether perceived racial discrimination, perceived language discrimination, and vicarious racism experiences increase the risk of psychiatric disorder for different Asian immigrant groups in the past 12 months. Results from group specic logistic regressions show that both perceived racial and language discrimination have strong deleterious effects on mental health only for Filipinos, while Vietnamese and Chinese are more likely to be affected by vicarious racism experiences. No signicant association was found between racial discrimination and the mental health outcome for Vietnamese and Chinese. Findings were discussed in the light of inter-racial contact pattern and acculturation status for each group.
Keywords Discrimination Asian American
Psychiatric disorder
Introduction
Discrimination is a widely documented risk factor in the study of racial/ethnic disparities in mental health. A number of systematic reviews have shown a consistent negative association between self-reported experiences of
discrimination and a broad range of physical as well as mental health outcomes [16]. However, to date, only a small portion of the current literature has explicitly focused on the Asian American (AA) population, the fastest growing and the most diverse minority group in US [710]. Most studies within this small body of literature covered a limited range of mental health outcomes and failed to consider the distinct impacts of multiple forms of discrimination experienced among the AA immigrants [11]. Moreover, previous studies generally treat AAs as a single homogeneous entity in examining their mental health status. However, evidence from recent studies on AAs highlights the considerable heterogeneity within the community of AA in terms of culture, socioeconomic status, acculturation status, health status, and discrimination experiences [7, 1114]. Such heterogeneity begs the question that how the mental health impacts of different forms of discrimination may vary across different subgroups.
Taken together, these limitations necessitate further investigation of the...