- Please see researchgate.net/profile/Sharon_Koehn/
Sharon Koehn
Simon Fraser University, Gerontology, Faculty Member
Research points to a higher risk for social isolation and loneliness among new immigrant and refugee older adults. Our article draws from a research project that explored the everyday stories of ageing among 19 diverse immigrant older... more
Research points to a higher risk for social isolation and loneliness among new immigrant and refugee older adults. Our article draws from a research project that explored the everyday stories of ageing among 19 diverse immigrant older adults in Canada. To capture their experiences of loneliness and social isolation, we use four illustrative cases derived from a structural approach to life-story narrative. To these we apply the intersectional lifecourse analytical lens to examine how life events, timing and structural forces shape our participants’ experiences of social isolation and loneliness. We further explore the global and linked lives of our participants as well as the categories of difference that influence their experiences along the continua of loneliness to belonging, isolation to connection. Finally, we discuss how an understanding of sources of domination and expressions of agency and resistance to these forces might lead us to solutions.
Research Interests:
Research on racialized older immigrants does not fully acknowledge the interplay between the life course experiences of diverse populations and the structural conditions that shape these experiences. Our research team has developed the... more
Research on racialized older immigrants does not fully acknowledge the interplay between the life course experiences of diverse populations and the structural conditions that shape these experiences. Our research team has developed the intersectional life course perspective to enhance researchers’ capacity to take account of the cumulative effects of structural discrimination as people experience it throughout the life course, the meanings that people attribute to those experiences, and the implications these have on later life. Here we propose an innovative methodological approach that combines life story narrative and photovoice methods in order to operationalize the intersectional life course. We piloted this approach in a study of the everyday stories of aging among diverse immigrant older adults in two distinct Canadian provinces with the goals of enhancing capacity to account for both context and story and engaging with participants and stakeholders from multiple sectors in or...
Research Interests: Education and Qualitative
Research Interests:
Immigrant older adults are increasingly moving into long term residential care (LTRC) homes; however, most were designed and continue to be run in accordance with Anglocentric norms and values. Participation and interest in Family... more
Immigrant older adults are increasingly moving into long term residential care (LTRC) homes; however, most were designed and continue to be run in accordance with Anglocentric norms and values. Participation and interest in Family Councils-through which they might collectively voice concerns-was low within our purposive sample of nine Chinese-origin residents living in LTRC homes and 11 family carers. Our study, conducted in two LTRC homes in British Columbia, Canada between January and March 2016, further explored participants' perceptions of quality of care by staff and quality of life of residents. Our findings negate participants' rationale that they do not attend because they have no issues to raise. Solutions must recognize that carers' time is precious and care-work is gendered; language incongruity and failure to address it marginalizes residents and their family members. A culturally informed reticence to speak out is reinforced when attempts to do so are silenced.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This pilot project asked: How do ethnically diverse older adult residents of assisted living (AL) facilities in British Columbia (BC) experience quality of life? And, what role, if any, do organizational and physical environmental... more
This pilot project asked: How do ethnically diverse older adult residents of assisted living (AL) facilities in British Columbia (BC) experience quality of life? And, what role, if any, do organizational and physical environmental features play in influencing how quality of life is experienced? The study was conducted at three AL sites in BC: two ethnoculturally targeted and one nontargeted. Environmental audits at each site captured descriptive data on policies, fees, rules, staffing, meals, and activities, and the built environment of the AL building and neighborhood. Using a framework that understands the quality of life of older adults to be contingent on their capability to pursue 5 conceptual attributes-attachment, role, enjoyment, security, and control-we conducted 3 focus groups with residents (1 per site) and 6 interviews with staff (2 per site). Attributes were linked to the environmental features captured in the audits. All dimensions of the environment, especially organi...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
RÉSUMÉLes Services de soutien pour les aînés projet communautaire sud-asiatique (SSAPCSA) ont été développé en réponse à la sous-utilisation des loisirs disponibles et des installations pour les aînés par des aînés sud-asiatiques qui... more
RÉSUMÉLes Services de soutien pour les aînés projet communautaire sud-asiatique (SSAPCSA) ont été développé en réponse à la sous-utilisation des loisirs disponibles et des installations pour les aînés par des aînés sud-asiatiques qui étaient particulièrement nombreux dans une banlieue en Colombie-Britannique. Abordant ce problème a nécessité la collaboration de la municipalité et un organisme enregistré à but non-lucratif offrant un large éventail de services et de programmes aux communautés immigrantes et réfugiées. Grâce à la sensibilisation créative et l’hébergement, le projet a engagé plus de 100 personnes âgées qui parlent panjabi chaque année à diverses activités impliquant l’exercice. Les méthodes de recherche ont porté sur l’étude de cas avec le personnel et les participants actuels et anciens cadres de SSAPCSA comprennent l’observation participante, entretiens individuels, et des groupes de discussion. Les conclusions, vues à travers le prisme d'interprétation critique ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Social Work, Dementia, Cognition, Humans, Health and Social Care, and 13 moreFemale, Male, Caregivers, Aged, Middle Aged, Alberta, Public health systems and services research, Time Factors, European Continental Ancestry Group, Asian Continental Ancestry Group, Memory Disorders, Alzheimer Disease, and Interviews as topic
Research Interests: Social Work, Dementia, Cognition, Humans, Health and Social Care, and 13 moreFemale, Male, Caregivers, Aged, Middle Aged, Alberta, Public health systems and services research, Time Factors, European Continental Ancestry Group, Asian Continental Ancestry Group, Memory Disorders, Alzheimer Disease, and Interviews as topic
Recent immigrant older adults and some visible minorities who have aged here—to whom we refer collectively as ethnic or ethnocultural minority older adults (EMOA)—both experience health inequities in Canada. These are primarily related to... more
Recent immigrant older adults and some visible minorities who have aged here—to whom we refer collectively as ethnic or ethnocultural minority older adults (EMOA)—both experience health inequities in Canada. These are primarily related to difficulties with the complex process of accessing suitable services and supports. However, Canadian research on the topic is extremely fragmented and hard to find, and knowledge users charged with designing policy and programs do not have the evidence they need to help them to address access barriers experienced by EMOA. This collection of literature reviews prepared by a team of multidisciplinary academics and multisectoral knowledge users begins the process of consolidating existing evidence. The Candidacy framework for understanding the complex construct of 'access' proved invaluable as a means of exploring the different questions posed by our knowledge user partners. The different dimensions of Candidacy, which take into consideration ...
You may be looking at this indexed bibliography on the health and health care access of older adults of South Asian origin living in Canada and similar countries because you are an older person of South Asian origin, a health or... more
You may be looking at this indexed bibliography on the health and health care access of older adults of South Asian origin living in Canada and similar countries because you are an older person of South Asian origin, a health or multicultural settlement service provider responsible for the health or health care access for this population, or a health or settlement services decision-maker looking for evidence to support your decisions around programming or allocation of funding. Or maybe you are an academic looking for background literature or hoping to identify gaps in the research. This bibliography is the result of a systematic year-long search of a diverse literature that, for several reasons described below, is difficult to ‘mine’ without considerable investments of time that few can afford, hence the decision to share this valuable resource. We have further added value to the bibliography by indexing the references and their abstracts according to several criteria, including co...
You may be looking at this indexed bibliography on the health and health care access of older adults of Chinese origin living in Canada and similar countries because you are an older person of Chinese origin, a health or multicultural... more
You may be looking at this indexed bibliography on the health and health care access of older adults of Chinese origin living in Canada and similar countries because you are an older person of Chinese origin, a health or multicultural settlement service provider responsible for the health or health care access for this population, or a health or settlement services decision-maker looking for evidence to support your decisions around programming or allocation of funding. Or maybe you are an academic looking for background literature or hoping to identify gaps in the research. This bibliography is the result of a systematic year-long search of a diverse literature that, for several reasons described below, is difficult to ‘mine’ without considerable investments of time that few can afford, hence the decision to share this valuable resource. We have further added value to the bibliography by indexing the references and their abstracts according to several criteria, including country of...
The Seniors Support Services for South Asian Community (S4AC) project was developed in response to the underutilization of available recreation and seniors’ facilities by South Asian seniors who were especially numerous in a suburban... more
The Seniors Support Services for South Asian Community (S4AC) project was developed in response to the underutilization of available recreation and seniors’ facilities by South Asian seniors who were especially numerous in a suburban neighbourhood in British Columbia. Addressing the problem required the collaboration of the municipality and a registered non-profit immigrant-serving agency. The strategies used and benefits gained can be understood in relation to Richmond’s Intercultural Vision and incipient Age-Friendly strategy.
This 5-page plain-language community based summary of the research funded by the LiVWELL group at SFU and by the United Way of the Lower Mainland highlights the benefits of he Seniors Support Services for South Asian Community Project... more
This 5-page plain-language community based summary of the research funded by the LiVWELL group at SFU and by the United Way of the Lower Mainland highlights the benefits of he Seniors Support Services for South Asian Community Project which is jointly hosted by DIVERSEcity Community Services Society and the City of Surrey and funded by UWLM. The program's purpose is to break down barriers to participation in chair exercise and yoga programs experienced by South Asian seniors. Additional benefits to seniors from the program include increased social support and "self-efficacy," based on which we argue that such programs are amn important starting point for the provision of self-management supports for chronic conditions among highly barriered immigrant minority seniors. Peer-reviewed publications are in preparation. The report is also available in Punjabi - see http://livwellresearch.ca/seniors_support_sa_community/
Theoretical perspectives that incorporate race/ethnicity/culture are not well developed in the ageing literature even today. There appears to be little consensus on how to use the terms even though there seems to be agreement that when... more
Theoretical perspectives that incorporate race/ethnicity/culture are not well developed in the ageing literature even today. There appears to be little consensus on how to use the terms even though there seems to be agreement that when this dimension is factored in, it accounts for disparities in health and wellbeing. Critics of Canada's multicultural programs and policies maintain that they have placed undue emphasis on the individualized attainment of cultural competency and language skills, at the expense of attending to the persistent racism and ethnocentricism inherent in institutional structures that undermine these efforts. • The same can be said of our teaching strategies which are similarly bedeviled with constructs developed from the relatively homogeneous samples we are able to obtain for gerontological research. These constructs and our approaches to teaching do not reflect the diversity evident among Canada's aging population, nor that found within the student b...
This report is the result of a planning grant exercise which is detailed in the lay summary for the grant that supported it, below: Recent immigrant older adults and some visible minorities who have aged here—together known as ethnic... more
This report is the result of a planning grant exercise which is detailed in the lay summary for the grant that supported it, below: Recent immigrant older adults and some visible minorities who have aged here—together known as ethnic minority older adults (EMOA)—both experience health inequities in Canada. These are primarily related to difficulties with the complex process of accessing suitable care. However, Canadian research on the topic is extremely fragmented and hard to find, and knowledge users (KUs) who design policy and programs do not have the evidence they need to help them to address access barriers experienced by EMOA. Effort is needed to consolidate existing evidence and design research that fills knowledge gaps with respect to access so as to generate a decision-making tool that can guide KUs in their decisions across different health and social care contexts. Our team of 13 multidisciplinary academics and multisectoral KUs is uniquely positioned to meet this challeng...
We would like to make our bibliographies freely available in order to further research in the area of health and healthcare of, for and with, ethnocultural minority older adult populations in Canada and elsewhere. We would also like these... more
We would like to make our bibliographies freely available in order to further research in the area of health and healthcare of, for and with, ethnocultural minority older adult populations in Canada and elsewhere. We would also like these references to be readily accessible to frontline service providers. However, we offer a couple of caveats. First, a scoping review does not assess the quality of materials included; it merely ascertains their relevance to the subject of interest and delimits an area of study. Second, the scoping review team has invested considerable time and resources to the ultimate production of these materials. This project was funded by a Knowledge Synthesis Grant (Study FRN 91772) Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Scoping review team members have also given very generously of their time. We therefore request that if you use any of our indexed bibliographies in your publications, reports or grant applications, please be so kind as to reference them approp...
The release of this important compendium of research reviews signals the coming of age of the field of minority aging in in the United States (U.S.). At least two important leadership decisions can be credited for this significant... more
The release of this important compendium of research reviews signals the coming of age of the field of minority aging in in the United States (U.S.). At least two important leadership decisions can be credited for this significant accomplishment: one is the emphasis in statements and rules by the National Institutes of Health on the necessity of inclusion of minorities in federally funded research (Ch 6); the second is support from the Gerontological Society of America for the creation of the Task Force on Minority Issues in Gerontology (c. 1987), the membership of which called for a “comprehensive volume devoted to emergent issues surrounding the aging process of diverse race and ethnic groups” (p. xvii). In the absence of such high-level leadership and the significant larger population of the U.S., Canada lags far behind in the generation of quality research on our immigrant and minority populations.
Purpose of the Forum: The ICARE forum Knowledge. Power. Access. was held on June 25, 2009 from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at Langara College in Vancouver, British Columbia. The forum provided an opportunity for the ICARE team to introduce... more
Purpose of the Forum: The ICARE forum Knowledge. Power. Access. was held on June 25, 2009 from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at Langara College in Vancouver, British Columbia. The forum provided an opportunity for the ICARE team to introduce and communicate our purpose to a diverse group of stakeholders from the multicultural settlement, community, health service provider and academic sectors. Participants worked collectively to develop research questions in each of the three prioritized theme areas: 1. Immigrant Women‐Centred Chronic Disease Care Model. 2. Older Visible Minority Immigrant Grandmothers as Caregivers. 3. Community Resources for Older Immigrant Women’s Mental Health. THE STATED FORUM OBJECTIVES WERE: - To clarify how gender, age and immigration can interact to create barriers to health care access for older visible minority immigrant women. - To identify and develop research questions in each of the three prioritized topic areas. - To collectively identify and prioritize ne...
Taking care of chronic disease: realizing approaches for Canada's aging ethnic population was a workshop held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in February 2011. The purpose of this workshop was to begin to address an existing... more
Taking care of chronic disease: realizing approaches for Canada's aging ethnic population was a workshop held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in February 2011. The purpose of this workshop was to begin to address an existing evidence gap on approaches to self management support that meet the needs of immigrant older adults with chronic conditions. This gap was identified by participants in a multi-stakeholder forum and subsequent community consultations with Mandarin- and Punjabi-speaking older adults organized by the Immigrant Older Adults: Care, Accessibility, Research and Empowerment (ICARE) team. In response, we conducted an environmental scan that resulted in an annotated bibliography. From this exercise we concluded that: (1) Literature on self-management supports for ethnocultural minority older adults is sparse and varied; (2) Evaluations of U.K. and Australian programs revealed that they predominately appeal to “white middle-class people with long-term conditions...
This newsletter was presented to residents as well as front line and administrative staff in 3 Assisted living sites (October 7th and 10th, 2014) in which we conducted our pilot study. Publications from the study are forthcoming.
Immigrants represent 28%of the Canadian population over 65,and older immigrants–more of them are women –now comprise the majority of the aging population in Canada’s large metropolitan cities. Despite ample research about abuse of older... more
Immigrants represent 28%of the Canadian population over 65,and older immigrants–more of them are women –now comprise the majority of the aging population in Canada’s large metropolitan cities. Despite ample research about abuse of older adults in general, few Canadian studies have focused on abuse of older immigrant women. This paper reports policy-relevant findings from a project that aimed to develop a shared program of research to prevent abuse of older immigrant women in Canada. The project involved a review of the literature on elder abuse and immigrant women, local meetings with key stakeholders in seven provinces, a public event in Toronto, and a two-day interdisciplinary symposium with provincial stakeholders. Two significant themes emerged from these activities: the value of bringing together professionals representing multiple disciplines and service sectors as well as older immigrant women and the need for changes in social policies to reduce older immigrant women’s vulne...
The 'Pathways to Diagnosis' study captured the experience of the prediagnosis period of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias through indepth interviews with 29 persons with dementia and 34 of their family caregivers... more
The 'Pathways to Diagnosis' study captured the experience of the prediagnosis period of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias through indepth interviews with 29 persons with dementia and 34 of their family caregivers across four sites: anglophones in Calgary, francophones in Ottawa, Chinese-Canadians in Greater Vancouver and Indo-Canadians in Toronto. In this cross-site analysis, we use the 'Candidacy' framework to comprehensively explore the challenges to securing a diagnosis of dementia in Canada and to develop relevant health and social policy. Candidacy views eligibility for appropriate medical care as a process of joint negotiation between individuals and health services, which can be understood relative to seven dimensions: identification of need, navigation, appearances at services, adjudication by providers, acceptance of/resistance to offers, permeability of services and local conditions. Interviewees experienced challenges relative to each of the se...