Ethnic Density and Maternal and Infant Health Inequalities: Bangladeshi Immigrant Women in New York City in the 1990s

Ethnic enclaves and gestational diabetes among immigrant women in New York City

“…Three previous studies have examined ethnic concentration and pregnancy health among South Asians, one in the UK (Pickett et al, 2009) and two in New York City (Mason et al, 2010(Mason et al, , 2011McLafferty et al, 2012). Among Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani women in the UK, there was an inverse association between ethnic concentration and risk of maternal depression and preterm birth (Pickett et al, 2009); and in New York City, there was a trend toward decreased risk of preterm birth among South Asian women (Mason et al, 2011).…”

“…Among Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani women in the UK, there was an inverse association between ethnic concentration and risk of maternal depression and preterm birth (Pickett et al, 2009); and in New York City, there was a trend toward decreased risk of preterm birth among South Asian women (Mason et al, 2011). A third study in New York City in 2000 examined Bangladeshi women specifically, and found a U-shaped pattern in risk of low birth weight, such that women in low-density and high-density neighborhoods were at increased risk of low birth weight (McLafferty et al, 2012). In the one study examining immigrant Mexican women in the Southwestern U.S., there was no association found between ethnic concentration and infant mortality (Jenny et al, 2001).…”

“…Finally, current literature on ethnic concentration/density has focused primarily on birth weight and preterm birth. These studies generally found either no effect or a protective effect of increasing ethnic concentration/density (Jenny et al, 2001;Mason et al, 2010;McLafferty et al, 2012;Osypuk et al, 2010;Pickett et al, 2009;Shaw et al, 2010), or did not specifically examine immigrant populations (Mason et al, 2011). No previous study, to our knowledge, has examined associations between ethnic concentration/density and gestational diabetes.…”

Immigration, barriers to healthcare and transnational ties: A case study of South Korean immigrants in Toronto, Canada

“…Recent scholarship recognizes the geographical variation in health and further conceptualizes health determinants as falling into two broad categories: compositional effects resulting from differences among individuals, and contextual effects reflecting differences among places (Diez Roux and Mair, 2010;Macintyre and Ellaway, 2003). At a local scale, the context of place affects health outcomes by shaping individuals' social networks, social capital, access to care, and access to other social and economic resources (Wang, 2007;Wang et al, 2008;McLafferty et al, 2012). At a global scale, transnational ties to the home country can shape the ways in which immigrants use health resources in both the host country and the home country and ways in which they seek health-related information from a variety of sources (Messias, 2002;Thomas, 2010).…”

Therapeutic mobilities

“…Many other papers address issues of health, well-being and medicine, without explicitly mentioning them in the title or in keywords. This includes pathogens' journeys (Schillmeier 2008;Sheller 2016), spatial spread and concentrations of diseases (Emch et al 2012), the effects of physical or cognitive limitations on everyday mobilities (Goggin 2016;Pyer and Tucker 2017;Rosenkvist et al 2010), the effects of everyday mobilities on public and individual health (Freund and Martin 2007;Gorman-Murray and Bissell 2018), well-being (Benediktsson 2017;Short and Pinet-Peralta 2010), the intertwining of migration or translocality and unhealthy behaviour (Yang et al 2016), incidence of illness (Lu 2010) and health inequalities (McLafferty et al 2012). However, the simple fact that health and medicine rarely make it into papers' title or keyword list mirrors perhaps the marginality of health to the field of mobilities research up until the current moment.…”