Parental awareness of health and community resources among immigrant families

Objectives: To examine the association between parental immigrant status and awareness of health and community resources to help address common family problems. Methods: Using the 1999 National Survey of America's Families, a survey of the health, economic, and social characteristics of children and adults, bivariate and multivariate analyses were conducted on 35,938 children to examine the relationship between parents' immigrant status (U.S.-born citizens, naturalized citizens, and noncitizens) and their responses to questions about their awareness of specific health and community resources. Results: Compared to U.S.-born citizens, noncitizens were at the highest risk of not being aware of health and community resources for most outcomes, followed by naturalized citizens. The services of which noncitizens were most likely to be unaware were places to get help for family discord, child care issues, and family violence. Multivariate analyses indicate that parental race/ethnicity, education level, employment status, and child age were other significant independent risk factors. Conclusions: Immigrant parents are at particularly high risk of alienation from systems of health care and support services that are available to low-income and other vulnerable populations in the United States. These findings clearly document disparate awareness among parents of different immigrant status. Community and health resources should reach out to immigrant populations, in linguistically and culturally appropriate ways, to alert them to the availability of their services.