Grant: Project Grant

Canada's immigrant and refugee population is growing rapidly, representing approximately 20% of the Canadian population. Despite the demographic significance, there is limited representative information on the mental health of this population. One significant challenge for the field concerns the absence of a cogent understanding of the ways in which individual, family, cultural, school, and neighbourhood factors are jointly associated with the mental health trajectories of immigrant and refugee children and youth from kindergarten through grade 12. This research project aims to address this gap. Our team has built a large, representative database, which follows children from kindergarten to grade 12, and captures mental health information as well as a number of factors that may be associated with mental health, including (i) migration factors (country of origin; immigration categories; age of arrival; generational status), (ii) social and socioeconomic family factors (connectedness to adults at home, maternal psychopathology, socio-economic status (SES)), and (iii) social, socio-demographic, and ethno-cultural characteristics of the receiving communities (connectedness to peers and adults at school, neighbourhood SES, and proportion of own-group immigrants in the neighbourhood). Using this database, and applying an ecological framework, we will examine the ways in which migration-related characteristics, contextual variables, and social processes are jointly related to immigrant and refugee child and youth mental health outcomes over time. This will allow us to identify actionable protective and risk factors to enhance immigrant/refugee child and youth mental health, thus providing important insights for prevention and intervention strategies.