Ghanaian Migrant Health Study

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has the world’s fastest-growing population and SSA-US migration is growing rapidly, contributing to greater demographic heterogeneity and aging of US immigrants. Our knowledge of SSA immigrants’ health comes primarily from analyses of US-based cross-sectional surveys that often combine Black SSA immigrants with those from Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and compares them with US born Blacks. SSA immigrants’ physical health tends to be better than US born Blacks, positing selective in- and out-migration, lifestyle, health behaviors, family and support networks, and cultural and racial contexts of origins. However, immigrants’ mental health, especially depression, tends to be worse than for native-born with evidence that greater exposure to US environments undermines immigrants’ health, particularly for racialized minorities. Current US data, however, are limited for understanding the countervailing forces promoting and undermining SSA immigrant health over time. We need data that: provide information on migrants’ premigration sensitive life-stage exposures and origin households (HHs); allow comparisons among migrants, return migrants and non-migrants at origin; map migrants’ social contacts at destination with kin and non-kin; measure post-migration exposure to discrimination and acculturative stress; and follow SSA immigrants and similar non-migrant Ghanaians over time to see how incorporation processes shape health behaviors and outcomes. This project proposes to collect and analyze pilot data on Ghanian immigrants in the US, in support of an RO1 submission. A different pilot, currently in the field, will recruit samples of Ghanaian households in Ghana. The data will include information on US migrant kin that will be used as the starting point for multiple sample recruitment approaches (conventional probability and link-tracing sampling designs) to sample 100 Ghanaian migrants in the US. This innovative project promises considerable gains in understanding of migration and health among the rapidly growing Ghanaian immigrant population in the US, with important implications for the development of new approaches to study rigorously other immigrant populations in the US and their contributions to life-course health and aging.