Arab American Mental Health in the Post September 11 Era: Acculturation, Stress, and Coping
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Persons of Arab (North African/ Middle Eastern) descent have faced unique psychosocial stressors due to the socio-political backlash following the World Trade Center attacks.These are compounded by traditional acculturation challenges, leading to increased psychological distress.This study satisfies an urgent need to better understand the acculturation and mental health experiences of Arab Americans by comprehensively and rigorously investigating hypotheses introduced in the previous literature.Participants were 611 Arab Americans from 35 U.S. states who completed a secure Internet form.Variables assessed were: acculturation (Vancouver Index of Acculturation-Modified Arab Version), acculturative stress (SAFE Acculturation Stress Scale-Revised; included issues of discrimination and American foreign policy), family functioning (Family Assessment Device-General Functioning Subscale), social support (Personal Resource Questionnaire85-Revised), religious coping (Brief Arab Religious Coping Scale), anxiety (Beck Anxiety Inventory), depression (Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression Scale), and a socio-demographics survey.Seven research foci were examined.First, 13 socio-demographic indexes hypothesized to relate to acculturation (including SES, generation status, length of residence in the U.S., English vs. Arabic language use, and Arabic TV viewing) were found to relate to American identity in the expected directions, while most indexes did not relate to Arab identity.Second, participants reported significantly higher anxiety and depression compared to normative samples and studies with other ethnic minority groups.Third, as hypothesized, integrated and assimilated individuals reported less stress, anxiety, and depression compared to those who were separated or marginalized.Fourth, as hypothesized, acculturation stress correlated with anxiety and depression, and both family functioning and social support related to less stress and less psychological distress.However, religious coping did not correlate with mental health.Fifth, contrary to the hypotheses, females did not demonstrate greater stress or psychological distress compared to males.Consistent with hypotheses, Christians demonstrated significantly less acculturative stress, anxiety, and depression compared to Muslims.Finally, structural equation modeling was used to develop a tenable model that explained the complex interactions among SES, acculturation, stress, mental health, and coping resources.Specific and practical recommendations are provided for clinical intervention, community programming and policy planning, and future research.vDedication This dissertation is dedicated to my family, my father mother and sisters, the coolness of my eyes.His patient and thoughtful mentorship has helped nurture and shape my interests and scholarship to what it is now.Only with his flexibility, kindness, creativity, and endless support was I able to reach this accomplishment.Special heartfelt gratitude goes to my dissertation committee members for their invaluable feedback.Thanks to Dr. Paula Dupuy for initiating an internal dialogue of cultural and personal sensitivity that struck a chord with me four years ago and has resonated throughout my work since.Dr. Funk has been my solid reference point amidst the challenges of graduate school, and I appreciate her constant and kind encouragement, consultation, and insight.I thank Dr. Peg Hull Smith for her thoughtful and challenging critiques and her enthusiasm for integrating culture in study.I am moreover appreciative of Dr. Mojisola Tiamiyu's infectious optimism and thorough critical feedback, as well as her sense of community justice, which was interwoven in the pages of this work.No amount of thanks could express what I feel for my loving family for their neverending support and prayers.My father continues to be my role model with his kindness, passion for education and scientific inquiry, and boundless motivation and focus.I am grateful for my mother's love, patience
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".