Structural and behavioural determinants of immigrant and non-immigrant health status: Results from the Canadian community health survey

The purpose of this paper, which utilizes data from the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS-Cycle 1.1), is threefold. The first is to examine the health of Canadian immigrants in relation to non-immigrants, focusing on the relationship between key health determinants and health status. Second, it tests whether these data support the well-documented ‘healthy immigrant effect’. The third is to evaluate the usefulness of using a large national database to study ‘special populations’ such as immigrants. Through a comparison of findings from previous studies, the authors highlight the strengths and weaknesses of different datasets for investigating immigrant health and, by extension, the health of other unique populations in Canada. The present study found that recent arrivals to Canada tended to be substantially healthier than the Canadian-born population. However, this advantage was lost over time, as immigrants with longer residence histories (10 years of residence or longer) tended to have inferior health statuses relative to the Canadian-born. These results indicate that the ‘healthy immigrant effect’ continues to manifest itself in Canada. The findings also suggest that the large sample of immigrants in the CCHS facilitated statistically significant associations between health determinants and health status. This is in contrast to the results of previous studies on immigrant health-such as those using the National Population Health Survey (NPHS)—which reported a number of non-significant and counter-intuitive relationships. We suggest that the CCHS, a comparatively much larger dataset with a diverse sample of immigrants, is a useful survey instrument to evaluate the health and well-being of special populations.