MIGRATION, COGNITIVE REPRESENTATIONS AND HEALTH PROMOTION
The purpose of this concept analysis is to explore the effects of migration and assess its linkages to the perception of health. The world is becoming smaller by the day secondary to technology and migration. Migration leads to exposure to a different culture that evokes changes and challenges in the lives of the individuals being exposed. Marsella, Kaplan & Suarez (1999) define culture as shared learned meanings and behaviors that are transmitted within social activity contexts for the purposes of promoting individual adjustment, growth, development, and societal stability and survival. Culture has both external and internal representations that lead people from different cultures to experience reality in different ways. Sperber & Hirschfeld (2004) explained that a cultural group is held together by a constant flow of information, mostly about local circumstances. Cultural information has to be remembered in order to maintain stability. Strauss & Quinn (1997), suggest that all information basic to understanding the world is processed by learned or innate mental structures and organized into cognitive representations of the real world (schema). Culturally derived schemata are knowledge- generated structures, which facilitate comprehension and inference, and are revised by the reconstruction of past memories (Keller, 1992) This concept analysis explores what happens when an individual is suddenly exposed to a new cultural context and how one from a different culture begins to learn and adapt to a novel culture (acculturate). Are individual representations of health and disease framed within a cultural context? Do they change after migration and exposure to a new culture? Questions basic to understanding how different cultural representations affect health-seeking behaviors and interventions directed towards health promotion will be addressed in this poster.
Session #1223 - Graduate Student Poster Session
The 29th Annual MNRS Research Conference (April 1-4, 2005)