Last Updated on January 4, 2022
Health literacy, resilience and perceived stress of migrants in Israel during the COVID-19 pandemic
Prof. Cheryl Zlotnick, Prof. Laura Dryjanska and Suzanne Suckerman
At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic Prof. Cheryl Zlotnick, The University of Haifa, Prof. Laura Dryjanska, Biola University California and the Anglo-List teamed up for a second time to conduct a study within Israel’s English speaking immigrant community which examined health literacy, resilience and perceived stress. The study was recently published in the Psychology & Health Journal and these are some of the results:
Objective
To examine perceived stress in migrants guided by Bornstein’s Specificity Principle in Acculturation Science (BSPAS) theoretical framework.
Design
Using a cross-sectional study, we recruited English-language migrants (n = 411) living in Israel to respond to an online questionnaire during the COVID-19 pandemic, from 3 April to 16 May 2020.
Main Outcome Measures
The dependent variable comprised the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) scores, which attained an internal consistency of 0.91 in this sample.
Results
PSS scores were related to lower age (p < 0.0001), being single (p = 0.0095), not possessing high (p = 0.0069) or medium resilience (p = 0.0002), reporting below average SES (p = 0.0196), being “extremely” worried about getting COVID-19 (p < 0.0001), and having high health literacy (p = 0.0007). Additionally, the interaction between health literacy and resilience (p < 0.0001) showed that migrants with high resilience and high health literacy had the lowest perceived stress; and migrants with low resilience and high health literacy had the highest perceived stress.
Conclusions
Interventions are needed to assist migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic. The optimal intervention will aim to address the psychological distress while increasing both health literacy and resilience.
Cheryl Zlotnick, Laura Dryjanska & Suzanne Suckerman (2021) Health literacy, resilience and perceived stress of migrants in Israel during the COVID-19 pandemic, Psychology & Health, DOI: 10.1080/08870446.2021.1921177
