An ecological model for understanding culture as a determinant of women's health

Abstract

In combination with gender and culture, the authors argue that the migratory experience must be considered as a determinant of the health of immigrant women in its own right. Gender and other symbolic institutions are seen as intertwined in an ecological model of health. Bronfenbrenner's (1986) systems theory and a combination of theories of social cognition, social exchange and symbolic interaction articulated by Howard and Hollander (1997) expand the ecological model. Cognitive schemas of gender and culture help explain the process of integration in a new locality over time. Success in addressing the health of immigrant women will be limited if the impact of migration and at the meso-and macro-levels is ignored in favour of a focus on the individual.

Pathways Into and Out of Homelessness: Domestic Violence and Housing Security for Immigrant Women

“…While housing insecurity is often discussed in terms of economic instability, the woman's sense of security for herself and her children were explicitly considered in the definition for our study. The conceptual framework we used included an ecological model of gender, migration and health (Thurston & Vissandjée, 2005); gender has been ignored in many studies on migration (Tastsoglou, Ray, & Preston, 2005), but was made explicit in this framework. The interplay of systemic factors with individual factors was also made explicit.…”

Book Review: Reid, C. (2004). The wounds of exclusion poverty, women's health, & social justice. Edmonton, Alberta: Qual Institute Press

“…This book also depicts the dilemmas of feminist action research in illustrating how social action and empowerment could be out of the control of the researcher despite her best intentions to generate social transformation. This book reinforces the urgency for nurses to examine issues of health inequities stemming from social injustice by using ecologic and social activist theoretical and methodological approaches to speak to power and fulfill nursing's social and ethical mission through engaged research as suggested by some nurse scholars (Falk-Rafael, 2005;Giddings, 2005;Thurston & Vissandjée, 2005 The Wounds of Exclusion Poverty, Women's Health, and Social Justice (Reid, 2004) may be overlooked by American nurses because its author is not a nurse and because it describes research conducted in Canada. Such an oversight would represent a significant loss for those nurse scholars concerned with the challenges of health promotion and socioeconomic disparities in health status.…”

¿Somos iguales? Using a structural violence framework to understand gender and health inequities from an intersectional perspective in the Peruvian Amazon

“…Furthermore, it facilitates reflection on the inextricable link between historical events and current inequities, something that is pertinent to the discussion of culture and health in the Amazon31. As a tool that recognizes the complex links between an individual and their environment and positions the individual at the centre of multi-level health determinants, it functions in complement to the ecological framework for health [22]. …”

“…Through this lens, modern communicable epidemics such as HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis are positioned as inseparable from, and a result of, ‘violent’ socioeconomic structures [12,13]. More recently, Montesanti and Thurston overlaid the concept of structural violence onto an ecological framework for health [22] by mapping the role of symbolic, structural, and interpersonal violence on women’s lives [23]. Through this process, intersecting social determinants of health are linked both to structural violence and to individual health outcomes, including interpersonal violence (Figure 1) [23].…”