A significant new research project will help policy makers and healthcare providers to understand how ethnic minorities experience harassment and its impact on their lives by making use of data from the largest longitudinal household panel survey in the UK – Understanding Society.
Working with a range of stakeholders to shape the project design, analysis and dissemination, the ESRC-funded study will offer new insights into the experience of discrimination over time for different ethnic groups in Britain, and the pathways between discrimination and mental health and health behaviours, in order to identify intervention points and priority areas for policy development.
The project will be led by Dr Alita Nandi and Dr Renee Luthra, working alongside Professor Michaela Benzeval and Professor Shamit Saggar, and will look at several research areas.
Firstly, who experiences ethnic or racial harassment? The study will look at an overview of the prevalence, intensity and persistence of harassment in British society today. Following a long tradition of survey-based research on harassment and its effects, the researchers’ first aim is to understand who is most likely to experience harassment in Britain today. Are particular ethnic and religious groups more likely to experience harassment? Which types of individuals within these groups are more vulnerable?
Secondly, the study will look at whether ethnic minorities living in certain types of areas at a greater risk of experiencing harassment and look for the causal impact of residential characteristics on harassment.
Thirdly, researchers will seek to identify protective factors against the negative impact of harassment on mental health and wellbeing. They aim to uncover factors that make individuals resilient to the negative consequences of harassment on mental health and wellbeing among ethnic minorities.
The fourth research area will look at the effect of ethnic or racial harassment on health behaviours. The researchers will examine related – but distinct – research questions: what is the effect of ethnic and racial harassment on the health behaviours of the adult foreign born? and what is the effect of exposure to ethnic or racial harassment on the health behaviours of UK born (or raised) ethnic minorities?