Eunice Anteh, Gina Netto and Sacha Hasan | Black History Month 2024, FJSS

Female refugees have higher prevalence of anxiety and depression but refugee women of African descent, in particular, face further substantial challenges from racial discrimination, unique cultural contexts, and systemic barriers that exacerbate access and use of mental health services. To investigate the needs and experiences of refugee women of African descent in accessing and using digital mental health services and to recommend strategies in the design and delivery of social and digital tools or models to improve these services. Through qualitative research design informed by a feminist translocational intersectionality framework, three focus group discussions and thirty-eight individual interviews with African refugee women, community support workers and mental health professionals were conducted in Scotland. Inductive thematic analysis is ongoing to better understand their experiences with digital mental health services. This research highlights African refugee women’s resilience in overcoming complex barriers to mental health support, using digital technology as a discreet pathway to healing.

Sebati Ghosh, Chen Kefan, Mehdi Rizvi, Yingfang Yuan, Andy Edmondson, Lynne Baillie, Wei Pang, Siamak Shahandashti

Minority ethnic (ME) communities are more likely to experience systemic racism, discrimination and marginalisation. Such inequalities lead to overcrowded social housing, dissatisfaction in and avoidance of health services, fuel poverty and more. As public services move online, the issues faced by MEs are not only being replicated but are accelerating and worsening. Exacerbating this, as more services are going online, critical new concerns about security and privacy are surfacing every day, often making headlines and further increasing user mistrust of online systems. Engaging with these issues requires understanding of how MEs view public services and their level of trust in these increasingly opaque online systems. Designing effective online harm-reduction tools will require a meaningful and accurate threat model, which will further depend on the inputs from an extensive analysis of ME communities’ concerns, views, and sentiments as identified and systematically collected in this project.

Yingfang Yuan, Chen Kefan, Andy Edmondson, Mehdi Rizvi, Lynne Baillie, Wei Pang

The Protecting Minority Ethnic Communities Online (PRIME) project [1] aims to deliver innovative harm-reduction interventions, processes, and technologies to transform online services (energy, health, and housing) and create safer spaces for Minority Ethnic (ME) communities. The principle of equal opportunities advocated by UN Sustainable Development Goals [2] stated each individual or group of people should ideally have equal chances to access most public services (e.g., GP) and resources without any discrepancies. To support the PRIME research and align with the principle of equal opportunities, we aim to identify the health concerns within ME groups and analyses the correlations among these concerns, as well as the correlations between these concerns and ethnicity. Consequently, this will enable other researchers to focus on how to alleviate these concerns and protect individuals with minority ethnicity.

Yingfang Yuan, Chen Kefan, Andy Edmondson, Mehdi Rizvi, Lynne Baillie, Wei Pang

We proposed a novel approach using latent class analysis (LCA) to quantify discrepancies in health service engagement and outcomes between ethnicities. Using this method, we have identified that the health service is experienced differently by different ethnic minorities and highlighted areas of focus for future work. This poster presents the results of our proposed approach on:

PRIME survey data, with a focus on respondents from Scotland

Census 2021 data from England, with a focus on health.