Mental Health Among Immigrant Survivors of Domestic Violence: The Role of Coping, Resilience, and Perceived Discrimination

Background:

Domestic violence (DV) is a pervasive problem in the United States (US) with significant mental health concerns. While DV is commonly defined as abuse and violence between current or former intimate partners, in-law abuse, referring to abuse and violence perpetrated by a member of an intimate partner’s family (e.g., parents), is relatively prevalent in Asian immigrants. In addition to DV, immigrant survivors may face difficulties with acculturation stress and perceived discrimination that can negatively affect their mental health and support-seeking. While some evidence indicates the protective role of problem (e.g., seeking instrumental support) and emotional-focused (e.g., seeking emotional support) coping and resilience in IPV survivors’ mental health, few studies have examined the role of coping, resilience, and perceived discrimination on immigrant survivors’ mental health status.

Methods:

Data were collected using a self-administered online questionnaire among a sample of first-generation (foreign-born), 1.5-generation (those who moved to the US before age 13), and second-generation (child of an immigrant parent). Participants were recruited using Qualtrics research panels and snowball sampling methods (N=419). The current analysis was conducted on a sub-sample of men and women who reported experiencing intimate partner violence and/or in-law abuse (n=165). A series of multivariate linear regression models were conducted to investigate (a) predictors of immigrant survivors’ mental health symptoms and (b) whether perceived discrimination predicted avoidance coping and resilience. Bivariate t-tests were used to compare avoidance coping and resilience between survivors with more and fewer encounters with discrimination.

Results:

Almost half (n=77, 47%) of immigrant survivors experienced both IPV and in-law abuse simultaneously. Immigrant men versus women reported a higher rate of both IPV and in-law abuse (men: 56%; women: 40%), whereas immigrant women versus men reported a higher rate of IPV only (men: 32%; women: 37%) and in-law abuse only (men: 13%; women: 24%). Perceived discrimination (β=0.2, p=.030) and avoidance coping (β=1.8, p=.001) were associated with more mental health symptoms, whereas resilience was associated with fewer symptoms (β=-1.2, p=.000). In addition, we found that perceived discrimination was associated with more use of avoidance coping (β=0.14, p=.000) and less resilience (β=-0.06, p=.002). Survivors who reported more encounters with discrimination reported using more avoidance coping (M=2.2 vs. 1.6, t=-6.2, p=.000) and lower levels of resilience (M=3.1 vs. 3.5, t=3.4, p=.001) than survivors who reported fewer encounters with discrimination.

Implications:

This study adds to the limited literature on immigrant DV survivors’ mental health and provides implications for practice and future research. First, our finding on the prevalence of IPV and in-law abuse suggests the importance of assessing in-law abuse and its impact when researching immigrant survivors. Second, the findings on mental health correlates imply that intervention efforts should be made to promote resilience and adaptive coping. Service providers can discuss the concept of resilience, address maladaptive responses to stress, and teach new problem-solving and emotion-regulation skills to foster survivors’ psychosocial resilience factors. Last, the findings on perceived discrimination suggest that practitioners should assess immigrant survivors’ perceived discrimination, explore how perceived discrimination affects them, and process the effects with survivors.