Negative Social Interaction at the Intersection of Gender, Race and Immigration Status

Background:

Negative social interactions, defined as “exchanges or behaviours that involve excessive demand, criticism, disappointment or other unpleasantness” (Sneed & Cohen, 2014, p. 555), often engender health-related issues, such as poor psychological wellbeing, poor self-perceived health, physical inactivity, frequent substance use, and low quality of life. Negative social interactions may affect people with different social locations differently. While some studies have focused on examining the experiences of negative social interactions among individuals with one or two social positions, such as Caucasian seniors and Asian immigrants, very few investigated negative social interactions at the intersection of multiple social positions. Informed by the intersectionality theory, this study seeks to understand how the multiplicative effects of different social positions, including gender, race, and immigration status, shape individuals’ experiences on the quality of social interactions. We hypothesized that individuals who are non-white and immigrants are positively correlated with greater negative social interactions, for both men and women.

Methods:

The study used the 2012 Canadian Community Health survey, a cross-sectional nationally representative survey that comprised of 21,932 participants over 15 years of age in Canada. Participants answered several health and mental health-related questions and provided socio-demographic information. Negative social interactions were measured as a dichotomous variable. An intersectional social position variable was constructed based on three social locations, including gender (man or woman), race (white or non-white) and immigration status (immigrant or non-immigrant). Multivariable logistic regression models, stratified by gender, were conducted to examine the associations between negative social interactions and intersectional social positions (race X immigration status). All models were controlled for age, marital status, education, personal income, substance use and mood disorder.

Results:

The majority of the participants were men (52%), white (77%) and non-immigrants (75%). Bivariate analyses showed that negative social interactions was significantly different across gender, race, and immigration status, respectively (all p-values <.001). Gender-specific analysis showed that compared to white Canadian-born men, both non-white immigrant men (aOR=1.38, 95% CI=1.22-1.57, p<.001) and non-white Canadian-born men (aOR=1.34, 95% CI=1.10-1.63, p=0.003) were more likely to experience negative social interactions. Among women, compared to white Canadian-born women, non-white Canadian-born women experienced higher odds of negative social interactions (aOR=1.22, 95% CI=1.04-1.44, p=.018), whereas non-white immigrant women have lower odds of experiencing negative social interactions (aOR=0.63, 95% CI=0.55-0.71, p<.001).

Conclusion and discussion:

Our findings provide a strong evidence that individuals in different social position groups experienced different negative social interactions. For men, belonging to a racialized group is a critical factor of experiencing negative social interactions regardless of their immigration status. For women, while racialized immigrant women demonstrated their potential resilience to deal with negative social interactions, racialized Canadian-born women experienced elevated negative social interactions, suggesting that issues in Canadian society such as racism, xenophobia and sexism may be at play. In order to improve the quality of social interactions and ultimately psychological health, future research should continue to unpack the experiences of individuals receiving negative social interactions in different social locations as well as factors that contribute to such interactions.