Family Resilience important this Families Day

The Families Commission is celebrating the International Day of Families by releasing a new report, Family resilience: the settlement experience for asian immigrant families in New Zealand.

International Day of Families was established by the United Nations General Assembly to promote the importance of issues relating to the family as part of society. The theme set by the United Nations for 2010 is the impact of migration on families around the world.

Families Commissioner Gregory Fortuin says, “A key strength of the report is that it explores Asian immigrants through a family lens, rather than looking just at the experience of individuals”.

“The report found that for immigrants to successfully integrate there needs to be a whole-of-community response, which does not simply rely on government agencies, but includes schools, churches, community organisations and local authorities,” says Mr Fortuin.

The research confirmed that issues related to employment and education, language and communication, accessing support, attitudes and culture of the host and immigrant communities, and dealing with stress, were all factors that impacted on the quality of the settlement experience. While the challenges faced by immigrant families were similar, the degree to which these impacted on families’ settlement experience differed.

“We believe this relates to family resilience, and, in particular, the strengths of the connections between family members, and those between the family and the community (including schools, friends and places of worship for example) and wider society (including support and government agencies),” says Mr Fortuin.

Refugee families did not have these existing links to the community that family and friends provided. This significantly increased the barriers to successful integration.

“By promoting a model of family resilience as a way to understand migrant families’ settlement experiences, we can better target interventions to enhance families’ resilience and maximise positive outcomes for migrant families”, says Mr Fortuin.

“It is appropriate that on Families Day we are able to highlight the importance of the family unit and family resilience, as key factors, in successful settlement in New Zealand.”

Editors notes:

THE REPORT

• This research report, Family resilience: the settlement experience for asian immigrant families in New Zealand, (hereinafter called the Report), is one of the first completed reports from the Families Commission Research Fund, initiated in 2007.
• The report was commissioned in February 2008 from the Centre for Child and Family Research and Centre for Asian Health Research and Evaluation from the University of Auckland.
• The main purpose of the research is to explore the way in which families from four Asian ethnic groups (Chinese, Korean, Indian and Southeast Asian/Asian with refugee backgrounds) including refugees, experienced immigration. The researchers used a resiliency-focussed approach identify the barriers and facilitators to a positive settlement experience.
• The report is a small and exploratory report that raises issues that could be further researched. As a qualitative study it was divided in two phases. In phase 1 of the study, 16 focus groups were conducted with 104 participants, 52 adults and 52 young people aged 16 to 25 years. In phase 2, in-depth interviews were conducted with 8 families. Family groups ranged in size from 2 to 6 members, with a total of 30 family members participating in interviews.
• The report provides a rich understanding of the challenges that the families in the study experienced in settling in a new country and will be useful to a wide audience, particularly those organisations and individuals working to make immigrant families’ experience of settlement in their new country positive.