Environmental Justice for Immigrant Workers: Research Methods to Promote Public Health

Immigrant workers constitute a significant proportion of the US workforce. In 2005, 14% of US workers were foreign-born and approximately 6.3 million foreign-born workers were undocumented. Successful occupational safety and health surveillance, research and intervention programs and policies that target immigrant workers must incorporate methods that address issues of language, literacy, and culture as well as political and economic vulnerabilities. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in collaboration with the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences funded several community-based participatory research projects under the auspices of an Environmental Justice program. This grant program was designed to develop approaches that ensure that the community actively participates with researchers and health care providers in developing responses and setting priorities for intervention strategies. This panel will present the experiences from six of the environmental justice projects targeting immigrant worker communities. Presentations will focus on research methods that have been successfully applied across the research continuum from data collection to implementation of interventions. Issues that will be addressed include: 1) methods for identifying the target population especially when immigrants may try to remain “in the shadows”, 2) the design and administration of culturally and linguistically appropriate survey instruments, 3) utilization of qualitative approaches such as key informant interviews to explore complex barriers to change such as power relations, and 4) approaches for constructing broad community partnerships incorporating a variety of perspectives to promote interventions.