By Atif Kukaswadia, Public Health Perspectives | Link to Article
By Atif Kukaswadia, Public Health Perspectives | Link to Article
Regular readers of the blog and my Twitter profile will know that my PhD dissertation is focused on the health of young people to Canada. In particular, I’m interested in how their health changes over time – does it get better? Does it get worse? Does it stay the same? And in particular, I’m interested in how they compare to peers born in Canada, and whether this is the same between different ethnic groups.
So, for example, if you took two South Asian kids, one born in Canada and one born abroad, what happens to their health? Is the one born abroad healthier? The same? What about after they move to Canada – if the one born abroad starts off healthier, does that persist, or does that benefit disappear with time?
I did a few interviews for this study with the media, and I’ve embedded them throughout the piece. So if you don’t want to read anymore, just hit play on the video below.
Now, there’s been a lot of research on this in the US. But the research in the US has focused on the ethnic groups that are of interest to the US – Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans. In Canada though, the major immigrant groups are from East and South East Asia and South Asia. Combine that with two different views on immigration (melting pot vs multiculturalism), and there’s not much evidence out there for what happens to kids once they move to Canada in terms of their physical health.
And that’s where I come in.
We just had a study published in PLOS ONE that looked specifically at the physical activity of young immigrants to Canada, and how their physical activity changes over time.
What did we do?
The Health Behaviour in School Aged Children Survey (HBSC) is an international survey coordinated by the World Health Organization in 43 countries in Europe and North America. We used data from Cycle 6 of the Canadian HBSC, which had data on approximately 26,000 youth in all provinces and territories in Canada, except PEI and New Brunswick. We categorized kids by ethnic group: Canadian, Arab, African, South Asian, East and South East Asian, Latin American and Other. We also categorized them by how long it had been since they moved to Canada: “1 to 2 years,” “3 to 5 years” “6+ years” and then “born in Canada.”
We then were interested in their physical activity levels, and put them into one of three groups based on the number of days of 60+ minutes of physical activity they reported. The first group was 1-3 days, the second was 4-6 days, and the third was 7 days a week. Only the last group met the Canada Physical Activity Guidelines, but then we were also interested in kids who were close (the 4-6 days a week group).