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Identification of Cultural and Transcultural Health Assets Among Moroccan, Romanian and Spanish Adolescents Through Photovoice

Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health volume 22, pages 255–265 (2020)Cite this article

Abstract

The health assets model focuses on recognizing the strengths, capacities and resources of individuals and their communities to improve health control processes. This study focuses on identifying and comparing the transcultural and cultural assets in health as accounted for by 45 young Romanians, Moroccans and Spaniards living in southern Spain. The research uses a photovoice method to understand what young people consider to boost their health. Of all the photographs taken, each young person selected the six most relevant images, and individual interviews were carried out. Both images and interviews were analysed qualitatively using Atlas Ti. We identified 40 transcultural assets in health that were common among the 3 cultural groups and 7 cultural assets that were specific to cultural groups. The seven assets include religion and spirituality, cultural symbols, medicine, traditional food, thinness, freedom/autonomy and plants. The definition of transcultural and cultural health assets facilitates the development of educational health interventions that reinforce the strengths of others in a culturally sensitive manner.

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Data Availability

The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the participant educational centres and the adolescents for their support.

Funding

This study was funded by a grant from Ministry of Economy and Competitiviness of Spain (Grant/Award No. EDU2011-26887).

Author information

Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Almeria, Almeria, Spain

    Encarnación Soriano-Ayala & Verónica C. Cala

  2. Faculty of Nursing, University of Almeria, Almeria, Spain

    Diego Ruiz-Salvador

Authors
  1. Encarnación Soriano-Ayala
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  2. Verónica C. Cala
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  3. Diego Ruiz-Salvador
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Contributions

ES conceived and design the presented project. ES, VC and DR contributed to the implementation of the research, to the analysis of the results and to the writing of the final report. VC and ES authors wrote this version of the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Verónica C. Cala.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Ethical Approval

The Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain evaluated the ethical dimension of the study and approved the project. In addition the Bioethics Commission from the University of Almeria accepted and approved the study.

Consent to Participate

To guarantee the information, voluntary and conscious participation of all the participants, a written informed consent was provided, explaining the anonymous and confidential nature of the extracted data, which had to be signed by the parents or legal guardians and. In addition, a verbal consent was recorded in all the interviews. Likewise, to reduce the socioeconomic bias, cameras were made available to the participants who did not have cameras or mobile phones.

Consent for Publication

Written informed consent was obtained from the participants for publication of their individual details and accompanying images in this manuscript. The consent form is held by the authors and is available for review by the Editor-in-Chief.

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Soriano-Ayala, E., Cala, V.C. & Ruiz-Salvador, D. Identification of Cultural and Transcultural Health Assets Among Moroccan, Romanian and Spanish Adolescents Through Photovoice. J Immigrant Minority Health 22, 255–265 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10903-019-00934-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10903-019-00934-1

Keywords

  • Transcultural health
  • Photovoice
  • Health assets
  • Immigrant
  • Adolescents
  • Romanian
  • Moroccan
  • Spanish