Page 33 - IJPS-3-1

Sizhe Liu and Wei Zhang

Huang et al., 2014) revealed that religious attendance reduces the risk of mental health
problems, but the stress-buffering role of religion is not identified. Ai and colleagues
(2016) examined the heterogeneity of Asian Americans in terms of the association
between religious involvement and self-rated mental health and found religious
involvement is associated with better self-rated mental health only for the Chinese
Americans. These findings demonstrate that religious involvement has the capacity of
reducing the risk of mental health problems for Asian Americans. However, the stress-
buffering role of religion has not been explicitly tested and identified. It is not clear
whether religious involvement could alleviate the detrimental mental health effect of
stressors for Asian-American immigrants. The current study continues efforts along
this line by examining other indicators of religious involvement and major mental
health problems.
Taken together, this study has two major aims. First, we will examine the direct
effects of age at immigration and English proficiency on 12-month depressive disorder
and suicidal ideation. Based on previous studies, we propose that both a young age at
immigration and limited English proficiency will increase the risk of having depressive
disorder and suicidal ideation. Second, we aim to test the stress-buffering role of
religious involvement. We hypothesize that religious involvement will reduce the risk
of depressive disorder and suicidal ideation among those who immigrated to the U.S.
at a younger age and those with limited English proficiency.
2 Methods

2.1 Data

This study utilizes the Asian-American immigrant sample from the National Latino
and Asian American Study (NLAAS), the first nationally representative study that
examines mental health of Asian Americans and Latinos in the United States. The
NLAAS is part of the Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiological Studies (CPES)
and its sampling design consists of three stages (Alegria, Takeuchi, Canino et al.,
2004; Heeringa, Wagner, Torres, et al., 2004; Duldulao, Takeuchi, and Hong, 2009).
The first stage was core sampling of city and contiguous census blocks from which
housing units and household members were sampled. The second stage involved
the supplementary sampling based on population density. Within this stage, census
blocks with more than 5% of the target Asian Americans were over-sampled. The
final stage further enlarged the sample size by recruiting the secondary individuals
from the households where a primary member had completed the interview. Face-
to-face interviews were conducted with primary respondents unless they requested
a telephone interview. Secondary respondents were interviewed by telephone. Both
in-person and telephone interviews were conducted by bilingual interviewers. After
excluding missing values, the final analytical sample consists of 1,641 Asian-American
immigrants who were born in a foreign country. The main ethnic groups include Asian
Americans of Chinese, Filipino, and Vietnamese descents. The sample only includes a
very small number of Asian Americans of other ethnicities.

2.2 Measurement

2.2.1 Dependent Variables
This study examines two aspects of mental health problems — 12-month depressive
disorder and suicidal ideation. To measure 12-month depressive disorder, the World
Health Organization Composite International Diagnostic Interview (WMH-CIDI),
a fully structured diagnostic instrument based on the criteria of the Diagnostic and
Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders, Version four (DSM-IV) was used. Suicidal
ideation was measured by asking respondents if they had ever seriously thought about
committing suicide. Both 12-month depressive disorder and suicidal ideation were

International Journal of Population Studies 2017, Volume 3, Issue 1 27