Development and Preliminary Validation of Multidimensional Acculturative Stress Scale for Pakistani Immigrants in Toronto, Canada

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Abstract

The multidimensional acculturative stress scale (MASS) was developed to capture the unique stressors in different life domains faced by Pakistani adult immigrants (214) residing in Canada. Exploratory factor analysis of 32-item pool yielded a 24-item measure with five distinct factors including discrimination, threat to ethnic identity, and lack of opportunities for occupational and financial mobility, homesickness and language barrier. The Cronbach's alpha and internal consistency estimates provided reliability evidence for the total MASS and its five subscales. Further, concurrent validity estimates using the General health Questionnaire-12 (Goldberg & Williams, 1988) and the Psychological Well-being Questionnaire (Ryff & Singer, 1996) also supported the use and continued development of the MASS.

Introduction

The purpose of the present research was to develop a comprehensive measure of acculturative stress for Pakistani adult immigrants. Especially as risk, as this paper will show, are those among them who happen to be married, with children. It has been suggested that the understanding of stress and perception of stressors is culture-based (Bryant-Davis, 2005), and without understanding the cultural context, we may incorrectly suppose a risk factor to exist or not exist (Rutter, 1990). The literature indicates that acculturative stress has varied widely in the nature and level of difficulties found by immigrant groups (Farver et al., 2002, Hovey and King, 1996, Sam and Berry, 1995). For example, Asian experience more acculturative stress than their European counterparts; because the former may experience greater cultural difference than the latter (Kaul, 2001). It is evident that research has been particularly lacking on the cultural adjustment of South Asians—those coming from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan or the Maldives (Sheth, 1995). Furthermore, little attention has been paid to the intra-cultural stressors that these groups face (Dana, 1993). The perception of threat to ancestral culture can cause serious friction within the immigrant community itself.

Pakistani immigrants are an understudied and neglected ethnic minority group lumped together with other South Asians. Thus far, very few published studies have examined acculturative stress solely within Pakistani immigrant groups. It is possible that certain stressors may be more salient to adult immigrants with children from Pakistan than to those migrating from other countries around the world, and vice versa. They may experience unique stressors, such as threats to ethnic identity and culturally specific values and patterns of living. To date, there are not many instruments that are available to specifically measure acculturative stress. Moreover, instruments specifically for use with adults are even more limited.

This aim of this study is to contribute to the existing knowledge and understanding of the acculturative stressors faced by Pakistani adult immigrants and complements other research on South Asian immigrants in Canada. What makes it distinct from other studies is that it focuses on Pakistani adult immigrants with children in the Greater Toronto Area; a population that has not been studied previously. Systematic research on the situation of this group of immigrants in one of Canada's biggest cities is necessary in order to identify relevant issues required to initiate new policy directives and better services.

With the dramatic increase in immigration to Canada in recent years, mental health professionals are called upon to provide responses to the psychological needs of a population of people who as yet are not well understood. As the number of Pakistani immigrants is expected to continue growing, research is needed to understand how they adapt to Canadian society, and the problems they may encounter in this process. Pakistan is included in the top ten countries of origin for immigrants to Canada as 60,000 Pakistanis immigrated to Canada during the period 2001 to 2006. Around, 40,000 Pakistanis have settled to Toronto from Pakistan during 2001 to 2006. Currently, 100,000 Pakistani immigrants (or permanent residents) reside in Toronto (Statistics Canada, 2005, Statistics Canada, 2006).

When immigrants become part of a new country, they experience acculturative stress in an attempt to adjust to a new culture (Berry, 1987, Mori, 2000, Williams and Berry, 1991). “Acculturative stressors” refers to the stimuli the immigrant encounters, while the “stress” is reserved for the immigrant's response, which some scholars have termed “culture shock” (Oberg, 1960, Pedersen, 1995). In general, acculturative stress is defined as a stress reaction in response to life events that are rooted in the experiences of acculturation (Berry, 2005), or psychosocial stressors resulting from unfamiliarity with new customs and social norms (Church, 1982).

Despite the lack of research on Pakistani immigrants, some assumptions can be made about what issues are important during the transition process and eventual settlement, based on the immigrant populations that have been studied. A number of studies have been conducted in order to identify stressors that are unique to a single ethnic or racial group (Vega, Khoury, Zimmerman, Gil, & Warheit, 1995). Previous studies that have been done on acculturative stress among other Asian (Ying, 2005), Mexican (Padilla, Cervantes, Maldonado, & Garcia, 1988) and Central American immigrants (Hovey, 2000) could inform the acculturative stressors that Pakistani immigrants may encounter. For example, Mena, Padilla, and Maldonado (1987) defined them as the sum of social, attitudinal, familial, and environmental stresses that impinge upon the immigrant as a result of his or her immigration. In the same year, Berry, Kim, Minde, and Moke (1987) identified five major categories that cover the nature of acculturative stressors including physical, environmental, biological, social, cultural, and psychological. Later, Wong (1997) developed another framework for the measurement of acculturative stressors and introduced four categories of stressors that immigrants face during resettlement, namely: survival issues, losses, cultural differences and expectation.

There is significant evidence that immigrants may encounter physical as well as biological stressors. Physical stressors that immigrants may encounter in a new country include climate, unfamiliar setting, housing, and safety (Church, 1982), whereas biological stressors include food and disease (Ben-Sira, 1997, Ritsner et al., 2000, Ryan and Twibell, 2000, Ying, 2005). The domain of social stressors includes homesickness and isolation (Swagler and Ellis, 2003, Ying, 1996), while cultural stressors include differences in cultural values and racial discrimination (Pedersen, 1995, Ying et al., 2000). It has been indicated that social stressors are particularly emotionally demanding for immigrants including homesickness for the native country, family and friends left behind (Church, 1982, Mori, 2000, Sandhu and Asrabedi, 1994). They feel loneliness, estrangement from others, and experience difficulty in making new friends (Ben-Sira, 1997, Ritsner et al., 2000, Ryan and Twibell, 2000, Yeh and Inose, 2003). Similarly, functional stressors cover the areas of language, work or study of the migrant and family members, financial difficulty and transportation (Ben-Sira, 1997, Church, 1982, Ritsner et al., 2000, Ryan and Twibell, 2000, Yeh and Inose, 2003).

Another important element, missing from most of the previous lists of acculturative stressors is threat to ethnic identity. Immigrants deal with conflicts between different systems of values, belief and behaviors, namely those of society, those of his or her own ethnic group, and those belonging to his or her own sphere (Berry et al., 1987, Schmitz, 1992, Zheng and Berry, 1991). This adaptation to the cultural values, norms, and behaviors of the dominant group generally causes unavoidable psychological distress for the members of the acculturating group (Inman et al., 2002, Portes and Rumbaut, 2001). As a consequence, threats to (ethnic or cultural) identity, powerlessness, and feelings of marginality, sense of inferiority, loneliness, and perceived alienation become major mental health risks (Rutter & Tienda, 2005).

A key issue to be determined in the initial stages of scale development is the scope or generality of the target construct. In the initial stages, a thorough review of literature is essential to investigate existing scales and concepts to which the target is expected to be related as well as distinguished. Although it is essential to compare and consider the already developed acculturative stress scales before developing a new measure, stressors may differ at each of many levels of abstraction. While several studies have been conducted on Asian immigrants (e.g., Chinese, Korean and Taiwanese) for the identification of acculturative stressors and the results of these studies are promising, majority of these studies examined only college or university immigrant students (Ji, 1995, Ying, 2005, Zheng and Berry, 1991). For example, Sandhu and Asrabedi (1994) developed an Acculturative Stress Scale for International Students and, as research indicates acculturative stressors may differ depending on demographics like age, marital status and ethnic groups, we cannot extend their findings specifically to Pakistani adult married immigrants with children. Further, the content of this scale ignores some important stress dimensions and overemphasize, similar dimensions like perceived discrimination and perceived hate. Moreover, the content of the scale is very similar to that of the SAFE Scale (Mena et al., 1987).

It is important to note that very little work has been done on other measures of acculturative stress. The Multidimensional Acculturative Stress Inventory (Rodriguez, Myers, Mira, Flores, & Garcia-Hernandez, 2002) was developed specifically for the Mexican American population, and conceptually differs from other scales in that perceived discrimination and social stress are not included in the definition of acculturative stress. The scale is of limited applicability in the South Asian context due to its specificity to one population that has a well-developed community in Canada. Moreover, the Multidimensional Acculturative Stress Inventory has not been used in further studies.

The review of literature (Rodriguez et al., 2002) has revealed some other flaws regarding the measurement of acculturative stress. For example, the authors examine the relationship between level of acculturation and psychological distress and treat these stresses interchangeably with acculturative stress. In such studies, where stress was not directly attributable to acculturation (e.g., marital problems) could not be distinguished from that specifically attributable to the acculturative process (language barriers, etc.).

Section snippets

Procedure

The present study applies the purposive non-random sampling technique in collecting data and two methods were used to collect the data from participants living in the Greater Toronto Area including both interview and mail responses as methods. The researcher contacted Pakistani community centers; shopping centers, Pakistani populated community buildings, Pakistani grocery stores and English language learning centers. Word of mouth also used to recruit to participants who met the inclusion

Stages of Scale Development

Multidimensional Acculturative Stress Scale has gone through different stages in the course of its development.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

The correlation matrix of the final 32 items was subject to Principal Component Analysis with the extraction of all factors having an eigenvalue of 1.0 or more and the rotation of these factors by Varimax. As recommended by Tabachnick and Fidell (2001), the condition of the distribution of the participants’ responses was evaluated through Bartlett's test of sphericity (Bartlett, 1954). Bartlett's test of sphericity was significant (p = .0001), indicating that the data were adequately distributed

Reliability Analysis of the MASS

The 24-item MASS was administered to 40 participants (67% male and 32% female) in second separate reliability analysis study. Participants ranged in age from 25 to 50 years (M = 34.27, S.D. = 6.93), with at least one child. Of the total sample, 57% were living in Canada for the last one to three years, and 43% were living there for more than three to five years. The Cronbach's alpha coefficient for the total scale was .86. Internal consistency estimates for the MASS subscales in the current study

Concurrent Criterion Validity

Concurrent validity means that the results given by a valid measurement “should covary strongly (or agree) with the results given by other operational definitions of the same concept or measures of a related concept” (Watt & van den Berg, 1995, p. 127). Research on immigrant health often takes the stress-health outcome framework in order to describe a significant link between immigration experience (stress), and health outcomes (Kim, 2002, Yeh and Inose, 2003). As consistent with the

Results

To examine evidence of concurrent criterion validity a correlation matrix was produced (Table 4) for the five subscales, total MASS, and the hypothesized correlates of acculturative stress including the total PWBQ (Ryff & Singer, 1996) scores and the total GHQ-12 scores (Minhas & Mubbashar, 1996). The results indicated that all five subscales of the MASS correlated significantly, and in the expected direction with these criterion measures (positively with depression and negatively with

Discussion

The main purpose of this multistage investigation was to develop a shorter, but comprehensive scale that quantitatively measures the level of acculturative stress among Pakistani immigrants living in Canada. The MASS represents an advancement in the development of indigenous psychological assessment for Asian immigrants generally and Pakistani adult immigrants specifically. The items of the MASS were developed by conducting in-depth interviews, undertaking qualitative data analysis and

Recommendations

Although the current findings provide initial validity evidence for the MASS, future research is necessary. Further, confirmatory factor analysis needs to be conducted to test the goodness of fit of factor structure of the MASS to provide further evidence for the validity of the constructs. Second, it is essential to develop a more comprehensive conceptualization of stressors associated specifically with Pakistani immigrant populations. For example, an important dimension of acculturative

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