Project Title
Keeping well: a qualitative community-based exploration of Chinese seniors’ wellbeing-related practices in Toronto, Canada
Student investigator
Minhui Yang
Supervised by Josephine Pui-Hing Wong, with committee members Lili Lai and Ping-Chun Hsiung
Objectives
The study objectives are to critically generate knowledge on: 1) older Chinese immigrants’ perceptions and practices for keeping well in individual and group settings; 2) what are the facilitators and barriers of their keeping-well practices; 3) the impacts of social, cultural, economic, and political living contexts on their keeping-well practices. To achieve these objectives, I conducted an exploratory qualitative study with older Chinese immigrants in Toronto.
Research questions
The research questions are (1) how do Chinese seniors make sense of aging and keeping well?; (2) what are the strategies, challenges, and needs for them to keep well in everyday life?; (3) how the strategies are shaped and evolving in the transnational living contexts of the Chinese seniors? 4) how community-based health and social care can assist their and other racialized seniors’ self-care practices?
Background
Like other countries, Canada’s population is aging. By 2046, seniors (aged 65+) will reach 4.4 million in Ontario, making up 21.8% of the provincial population. In recent years, ‘age well’ has become a new vision in public health. Besides aging, another characteristic of Canadian society is its diverse ethnic-cultural communities, among which there are 1.8 million Chinese Canadians, making up nearly 5% of Canada’s population. Literature review and my preliminary findings indicated that racialized seniors of many ethnic-cultural minority communities, including Chinese, have distinct ways of understanding well-being and keeping well. Although occasional news stories on Qi Gong and Tai Chi depict Chinese seniors as actively engaging in wellbeing-related activities, it is yet to be explored how they perceive and practice keeping well and aging well, and the challenges and needs of their keeping-well practices at home and in community.
Previous studies, anecdotal reports, and news stories suggest that older Chinese immigrants’ ways of keeping well are rooted in their philosophical and ideological traditions, trajectories of transnational living experience, and familial and social networks. Despite the differences between Chinese seniors and local Canadian residents in all these aspects, the voices of the Chinese seniors themselves in ways of keeping-well are seldom heard in public, their knowledge is seldom disseminated to the general population, and their unique challenges are seldom addressed by public health and social service endeavours.
Methods
This study applies critical ethnography methods guided by the Bourdieusian theories of social practices and Chinese indigenous social theories. I use qualitative interview methods to collect data. I have done three focus group interviews with Chinese seniors (23 participants in total) to understand their perceptions, actions, challenges, and service needs for aging well. I have finished 10 individual in-depth and go-along interviews with Chinese seniors by going with them to online and physical locations where they frequent for wellbeing-related practices, to understand their wellbeing in contexts. Information on the history and current circumstances of well-being-related services provided for Chinese seniors in community has been collected through 5 individual interviews with the service providers.
Current Status
Data analysis and manuscripts writing
Expected completion
August 2023
Key words
healthy behaviours, aging, well-being maintenance and improvement, immigrant’s health, cultural-based health promotion, self-care