Integration of immigrants into a new culture is related to poor sleep quality
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Integration of immigrants into a new culture is related to poor sleep quality Ursula Voss*1,2 and Inka Tuin3 Address: 1Dept. of Psychology at the J.W. Goethe-University Frankfurt/M., Mertonstr. 17, 60054, Frankfurt/M., Germany, 2Dept. of Cognitive Psychology at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-University Bonn, Kaiser-Karl-Ring 9, 53111, Bonn, Germany and 3Clinic for Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany Email: Ursula Voss* - [email protected]; Inka Tuin - [email protected] * Corresponding author
Published: 10 August 2008 Health and Quality of Life Outcomes 2008, 6:61
doi:10.1186/1477-7525-6-61
Received: 29 April 2008 Accepted: 10 August 2008
This article is available from: http://www.hqlo.com/content/6/1/61 © 2008 Voss and Tuin; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract Background: This article reports on the relationship between cultural influences on life style, coping style, and sleep in a sample of female Portuguese immigrants living in Germany. Sleep quality is known to be poorer in women than in men, yet little is known about mediating psychological and sociological variables such as stress and coping with stressful life circumstances. Migration constitutes a particularly difficult life circumstance for women if it involves differing role conceptions in the country of origin and the emigrant country. Methods: The study investigated sleep quality, coping styles and level of integration in a sample of Portuguese (N = 48) and Moroccan (N = 64) immigrant women who took part in a structured personal interview. Results: Sleep quality was poor in 54% of Portuguese and 39% of Moroccan women, which strongly exceeds reports of sleep complaints in epidemiologic studies of sleep quality in German women. Reports of poor sleep were associated with the degree of adoption of a German life style. Women who had integrated more into German society slept worse than less integrated women in both samples, suggesting that non-integration serves a protective function. An unusually large proportion of women preferred an information-seeking (monitoring) coping style and adaptive coping. Poor sleep was related to high monitoring in the Portuguese but not the Moroccan sample. Conclusion: Sleep quality appears to be severely affected in women with a migration background. Our data suggest that non-integration may be less stressful than integration. This result points to possible benefits of non-integration. The high preference for an information-seeking coping style may be related to the process of migration, representing the attempt at regaining control over an uncontrollable and stressful life situation.
Background The present study was part of a project investig
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