| In Madeline Leininger’s Culture Care Diversity and Universality Theory, she theorized that while the concept of health is universal, the meaning of health is defined by a person’s culture. Culture contributes to health and lifestyle habits, but also can influence health-seeking behavior. Current research on refugee health has identified cultural factors such as religion, gender, country of origin, race, ethnicity, and marital status, that are associated with
health. Research on refugee health has focused on the resettlement period, but little information is known about the association of cultural factors and health in an established refugee population. The purpose of this dissertation study was to look at how factors associated with culture as identified in Leininger’s Sunrise Model influenced health with refugees based on the number of years the refugees lived in their host country.
This dissertation study was a descriptive, cross-sectional design which used secondary data of 110 participants to look at the association of demographic characteristics, such as religion, age, gender, country of origin, race, ethnicity, marital status, and the number of years refugees have been living in the country, and the health status of a senior refugee population.
The study found that refugees who had lived in the USA longer than two years reported better health than refugees who had lived in the USA less than two years for whom data was available. In contrast and contrary to expectation, age was not found to predict health in the study sample of senior refugees. This could be due to the fact that prior studies focused on the general population of refugees, but this investigation focused only on a population of senior refugees. Refugees that reported race as either Asian, Black or African American, or Hispanic or Latino reported poorer self-rated health than refugees that reported race as white, but
race/ethnicity was not found to be associated with objective health. Consistent with the Leininger Sunrise Model, this finding supports the idea that cultural factors influence people’s health evaluations. The study variables: country of origin, ethnicity, and marital status, were not found to be associated with health, but all had missing data values that potentially biased the results. Missing data may be one reason the findings for these cultural factors did not align with the expectations of Leininger’s Sunrise Model |