While many may view language barriers in healthcare settings (LBHS) as a simple, practical problem, they present unique challenges to theoretical development and practice implications in healthcare delivery, especially when one considers the implications and impacts of specific contextual factors. By exploring the differences of contextual factors in the US and Japan, this review explores and highlights how such differences may entail different impacts on patients' quality of care and require different solutions. I conduct narrative review through library database, Google Scholar, and CiNii (a Japanese library database) with multiple search terms, including language barriers, healthcare, medical interpreter, and immigrant. I first present a diagram to show the pathways and process between language barriers and health disparities, using the literature reported in the US. Then, I examined the literature reported in Japan and discuss the needs for re-conceptualizing LBHS. The implications for future research will be discussed.
The meanings of homelessness are fluid and socially constructed, providing resources and limitations for individuals to negotiate their identities and relationships in everyday life. In this study, we examine the strategies and corresponding resources utilized by people who are homeless to cope with the labeling of a homeless identity and to redefine their identities. We used constant comparative analysis to examine in-depth interviews with 16 participants (male = 11, female = 5) who access a local homeless shelter in the southwest United States for resources. We identified three strategies that homeless people adopt to cope with the labeling of homeless identity: (a) differentiating oneself from others who are homeless, (b) prioritizing certain aspects of life, and (c) embracing the status of homelessness. Although these strategies have been identified in previous literature, the authors extend this line of research by identifying the common resources people who are homeless utilize when adopting these strategies, which entail important implications for theory development and practical implications.
Nearly one-third of the U.S. population provides unpaid, informal caregiving to a loved one or friend. Caregiver health literacy involves a complex set of actions and decisions, all shaped by communication. Existing definitions depict health literacy as individuals’ skills in obtaining, understanding, communicating, and applying health information to successfully navigate the health management process. One of the major problems with existing definitions of health literacy is that it disproportionately places responsibilities of health literacy on patients and caregivers. In this conceptual piece, we define and introduce a new model of Relational Health Literacy (RHL) that emphasizes the communicative aspects of health literacy among all stakeholders (patients, caregivers, providers, systems, and communities) and how communication functions as a pathway or barrier in co-creating health care and health management processes. Future directions and recommendations for model development are described.
One of the many strategies that many international students employ to cope with their lack of English proficiency is to pretend to understand or not to understand the conversational content exchanged with native English speakers. Combining autoethnography and iterative interviews this research explores the pretending behavior profoundly from non-native speakers’ perspectives. During the iterative interviews, six students shared their personal experience specified in pretending behaviors. This study aims at informing the second language learning experience and promoting mutual understanding between native and non-native speakers in multi-lingual and multi-cultural societies. As a result, under the metatheme (Tesch, 1987) of pretending in conversation, pretending as a Communicative Strategy, eleven themes emerged.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.