University of Kentucky, 263 Blazer Dining, Lexington, KY, 40506-0012, USA.
California State University Long Beach, 1250 Bellflower Boulevard, Long Beach, CA, 90840, USA.
Soc Sci Med. 2024 Nov;360:117335. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.117335. Epub 2024 Sep 13.
Migrant care workers (MCWs) play a crucial role in addressing healthcare workforce shortages in many developed countries. Existing reviews document the significant challenges MCWs face-such as language barriers, interpersonal discrimination, and sexual harassment-and describe the social support that MCWs receive, but ambiguous application and heterogeneous measurement of theoretical constructs have thus far precluded researchers from deriving generalizable insights about how various types of social support positively and negatively impact MCWs' well-being. Therefore, we conducted a scoping review on this topic and organized the literature using four theoretical perspectives on social support.
To synthesize interdisciplinary research on social support for MCWs and extend existing reviews, we conducted a scoping review of 56 empirical studies to understand how these studies conceptualize and operationalize social support for MCWs and the theoretical and methodological approaches they adopt.
Our findings suggest that scholars have implicitly and explicitly adopted a wide array of theoretical perspectives (e.g., stress and coping, social constructivism), with few studies engaging theories in substantive ways. The reviewed studies have demonstrated both positive and negative implications of social support for MCWs' well-being. However, these studies heavily focus on the social support MCWs receive, whereas the negative impacts of MCWs' unmet support needs remain under-investigated. Although empirical studies use diverse methodologies to study this topic, most quantitative studies approach social support from a stress and coping perspective. We advocate for researchers conducting quantitative studies to adopt a critical consciousness and work toward statistically modeling how the intersectionality of MCWs' identities and the multi-level nature of MCWs' power positions within their social networks may impact whether MCWs successfully obtain the support they need to thrive.
移民护理人员（MCWs）在解决许多发达国家医疗保健劳动力短缺方面发挥着至关重要的作用。现有评论文件记录了 MCWs 面临的重大挑战，例如语言障碍、人际歧视和性骚扰，并描述了 MCWs 获得的社会支持，但理论构建的应用不明确和测量方法多样化，使得研究人员无法得出关于各种类型的社会支持如何积极和消极地影响 MCWs 的幸福感的普遍结论。因此，我们针对这一主题进行了范围审查，并使用社会支持的四个理论视角组织了文献。
为了综合关于 MCWs 社会支持的跨学科研究，并扩展现有评论，我们对 56 项实证研究进行了范围审查，以了解这些研究如何概念化和操作 MCWs 的社会支持，以及他们采用的理论和方法方法。
我们的研究结果表明，学者们已经隐含和明确地采用了广泛的理论视角（例如，压力和应对、社会建构主义），很少有研究以实质性的方式参与理论。回顾的研究表明，社会支持对 MCWs 的幸福感既有积极影响，也有消极影响。然而，这些研究主要关注 MCWs 所获得的社会支持，而 MCWs 未得到满足的支持需求的负面影响仍未得到充分研究。尽管实证研究使用不同的方法来研究这个主题，但大多数定量研究从压力和应对的角度来研究社会支持。我们主张从事定量研究的研究人员采取批判意识，并努力在统计上建模 MCWs 的身份交叉性和 MCWs 在其社交网络中的权力地位的多层次性质如何影响 MCWs 是否成功获得茁壮成长所需的支持。
