Questions and Conundrums: How Qualitative Methods Can Help Us Understand the Health Needs of the Elderly

Abstract

In this essay, I wish to highlight a few health-related arenas that are fertile ground for researching elderly Mexican or Mexican-origin populations. I also wish to use this opportunity to speak to the ways in which qualitative methods may be particularly useful for researchers in the field. Mexican migration to the United States has transformed the social landscape of both countries (Suarez Orozco, 1998). Hispanics are the most rapidly aging minority population in the United States (Garcia, Downer, Crowe, & Markides, 2017). While approximately 11% of native-born Mexicans now reside in the United States, the Latino community in the United States has grown to nearly 60 million residents, with Mexicans representing by far the largest proportion of these (Noe-Bustamante, 2019). The cohorts that have formed the bulk of the Mexican migratory experience during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s are now part of the aging population in the United States. At the same time, Mexico’s population is rapidly aging (Angel, Vega, & López-Ortega, 2017). This social phenomenon has created a unique opportunity in our efforts to understand the impact of socio-cultural context on the experience of aging in the Latino community.