Edward Cruz
Project 1
Title: Exploring the Impact of Culture on Metamemory
Researchers: Kristoffer Romero (PI), Renée Biss, Edward Cruz, & Catherine Kwantes.
Funder: Social Science and Humanities Research Council - Insight Development Grant
Project Description: This project aims to examine whether differences in cultural variables such as processing style impact metamemory, using experimental paradigms; and explore the core beliefs about memory across East Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Western cultures to reveal if there are shared underlying themes or differing patterns, using open-ended interviews and qualitative analysis.
Project 2
Title: Employment Trajectory of Philippine-Educated Nurses in Ontario, Canada
Researchers: Edward Cruz (PI) and Kristoffer Romero.
Funder: Social Science and Humanities Research Council - Insight Development Grant
Project Description:The aim of this study is to explore PENs’ transitioning experience into, and labour market outcomes within employment in Ontario. Within the scope of this proposed study, our objectives are:
- To examine PENs’ transitioning experience in terms of (a) the events, processes, and/or practices PENs undertake to learn, re-learn or unlearn skills, knowledge, and (b) the professional and workplace values and culture that allow them to effectively and safely function within the scope of nursing practice for which they have been registered.
- To explore the “broader institutional arrangements within and across education and training, the labour market and workplace” (Sawchuk & Taylor, 2010, p. 12) that may contribute to or hinder PENs’ transition, and that subsequently impact their labour market outcome, i.e., whether they assumed other nursing, healthcare-related, and/or non-nursing employment.
- To examine the role that “social differences, including those rooted in gender, race/ethnicity, …[and] national origin” (Sawchuk & Taylor, 2010, p. 15) play within the context of PENs’ transition.
Nazim Habibov
Project 1
Title: The origins of life satisfaction in Canada
Researchers: Nazim Habibov (Principal Investigator), and co-investigators Lida Fan (Lakehead University).
Funder: SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2018-2021)
Project Description: The intent of this project is to analyze the origins of life satisfaction (LS) for Canadians. Life satisfaction refers to the assessment made by people when asked to provide a conscious evaluative judgment regarding their satisfaction with life as a whole. The origins of LS research date back to the 1980s-1990s, which were characterized by an increasing disenchantment with the traditional economic approach to measuring progress. This approach was based on the aftermath of poverty and illness that followed WWII, and led to Western governments’ interest in measuring progress through gains in income and disease control. The limitations of economic indicators emerged in the 1960s-1970s and a new method of measuring social progress was required. With the growing understanding that life satisfaction is people’s ultimate objective, the era of the "Social Indicator Movement" emerged. Although research on the origins of LS is becoming increasingly common worldwide, a comprehensive systematic approach is lacking. As such, this project proposes to empirically test several alternative theoretical explanations of the origins of LS for Canadians by addressing several questions: What are the explanations of life satisfaction for Canadians at four levels: individual, community, provincial and country? How has the influence of these explanations changed over the last 10 years? Have these explanations been equally important over time for all Canadians, or has their importance varied across subgroups of population and jurisdictions.
Project 2
Title: Impact of global crisis on changes in public attribution of poverty: A multilevel analysis of 28 transitional countries.
Researchers: Nazim Habibov (Principal Investigator), and co-investigators Lida Fan (Lakehead University).
Funder: SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2017-2021)
Project Description: A country's welfare culture is greatly influenced by the general public's attribution of poverty. This in turn influences attitudes toward the poor, development of a country's welfare system, and designs and legitimacy of specific welfare programs. An individualistic attribution of poverty directly reduces support for a welfare state and poverty reduction strategies since it blames the poor for their poverty. A fatalistic attribution of poverty indirectly reduces support for poverty reduction by accepting that the results of current distribution are based on destiny or fortune. Conversely, adherence to a structural attribution of poverty leads to viewing existing poverty and inequalities as abnormal phenomena that should be corrected, further leading to increased support for a welfare state and strategies aimed at reducing poverty and counter-balancing inequality.
Against this backdrop, the purpose of this research project is to investigate changes in the public's attribution of poverty, resulting from the global economic and financial crisis of 2007. We focus on 28 transitional countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltics, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Drawing on a unique survey that was conducted in these countries before and after the 2007 crisis, this study addresses the following questions: What happened to public attribution of poverty in these countries after major social and economic trauma was incurred by the recent crisis? Are people now more likely to attribute responsibility for poverty to the poor themselves or focus blame on structural or fatalistic reasons? And, how did the determinants of attribution change after the crisis?
Jayashree Mohanty
Title: Community-based responses to gender-based violence during the COVID-19 pandemic: What works?
Researchers: Jayashree Mohanty (Principal Investigator), and co-investigators Betty Barret (University of Windsor), Johannes John-Langba (University of KwaZulu-Natal), Srinivasan Chokkanathan (National University of Singapore)
Funder: New Frontiers in Research Fund, Special Call – Research for Postpandemic Recovery (2023-2025)
Project Description: The overall objective of this study is to examine innovative practices employed by community-based organizations responding to intimate partner violence (IPV), and the effectiveness of these services during the pandemic and pandemic recovery in three countries: Canada, South Africa, and India. Aligned with Research Priorities 2.1.5 and 1.1 (United Nations, 2020) the proposed study focuses on strategies used to address gender-based violence (GBV) during COVID-19 and assess the sustainability of these strategies. The specific objectives of this study are to examine: How organizations serving IPV survivors in three diverse international contexts (Canada, South Africa, and India) have adapted their services during the COVID-19 pandemic? The cost-effectiveness of adapted services in these countries during the pandemic and pandemic recovery to mitigate the impacts of IPV; The challenges faced and resiliencies exhibited by IPV survivors in seeking help and their recovery journey amid the pandemic and recovery; and The ultimate goal of this study is to formulate practical recommendations that can significantly enhance the delivery of these services in similar emergencies that may arise in the future.
Jayashree Mohanty & Wansoo Park
Project 1
Title: Acculturation experiences and parent-child relationship in newcomer families
Researchers: Jayashree Mohanty (Principal Investigator) and Wansoo Park (Co-Investigator)
Research Assistants: Riham Al-Saadi, Sally Polus, Daline El-Hashimi
Funder: University of Windsor Women’s Grant
Project Description: Windsor-Essex has recently experienced a surge in the newcomer population. One in four people in Windsor-Essex are immigrants and among them 21% are newcomers (Windsor-Essex Immigration, 2014). One of the challenges many newcomer families face is parenting in a new culture. The proposed study aims at understanding the processes in which newcomer parents and children adapt to acculturation challenges within a system of parent-child relationships. Specifically, this research explores the underlying process through which newcomer parents and youth use their agentic capacities in negotiating, communicating, resolving acculturation related conflicts. Dysfunctional family environment is one of the risk factors for children to be involved in the child welfare system. Understanding how parents and children navigate and negotiate conflicting issues would help professionals and practitioners to understand the functional/dysfunctional patterns in newcomer families. Further understanding that children are agentic beings would help practitioners to develop interventions to promote children’s agentic capacities to protect themselves.
Project 2
Title: Cumulative Risk and Resilience among Newcomer Immigrant and Refugee Youth
Researchers: Jayashree Mohanty (Principal Investigator), and co-investigators Jane Ku and Wansoo Park (University of Windsor)
Funder: SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2019-2021)
Project Description: Integration of newcomer youth is a pressing issue for many policy makers in the receiving countries (Duprez, 2009). Research has shown that exposure to multiple risks increases the vulnerability of newcomer youth to mental health challenges (Allan, 2015; Guruge & Butt, 2015; Teodorescu et al.,2012). However, not all newcomer youth experience detrimental psychosocial and health outcomes. A small body of literature suggests that newcomer immigrant and refugee youth navigate successfully through these adversities and display a remarkable amount of resilience (Mawani, 2014). Identification of mechanisms and complex pathways through which resilience factors interact to influence various outcomes might inform policies and interventions. Therefore, the goal of the proposed mixed-method study is to examine how cumulative risk and resilience factors relate to psychosocial and behavioral outcomes of newcomer immigrant and refugee youth.
Wansoo Park
Title: Improving Health Equity among people with limited English proficiency: Experiences of Older age Chinese with Health Care Access in the Windsor Essex
Researchers & Partner Organization: Wansoo Park (Principal Investigator) Jane Ku (Co-Applicant), Sungee John (Co-Applicant & Partner Organization, Essex County Chinese Canadian Community Association), Kathryn Edmunds (Collaborator)
Funder: Social Sciences Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partner Engage Grant (PEG) (June 2024- May 2025)
Project Description: This Community-Based Participatory Research project aims to explore how racialization affect how Chinese older people with limited English proficiency negotiate with the health system in Windsor Essex, where there is a smaller Chinese population and there is lack of culturally sensitive and linguistically concordant services, compared with larger Canadian metropolitan cities. The overall goal of this project is to develop and share with advocacy groups, service providers and researchers critical new knowledge from their own perspectives about the health care access challenges of older Chinese (age 50 and over) living in Windsor Essex that arise from their limited English proficiency in a racialized context and where there is lack of culturally sensitive and linguistically concordant services to support older immigrant population. This will advance the goal of our partner organization, the Essex County Chinese Canadian Association (ECCCA) to research and document their senior members’ experiences with health care and health care providers to advocate for improvement of services, ultimately promote the wellbeing of their members and older Chinese population in Windsor-Essex.
Camisha Sibblis
Title: Schools, safety and the urban neighbourhood
Researchers: Camisha Sibblis (Co-Investigator/Research Collaborator), Naomi Nichols (Principal Investigator, McGill University), and other Co-Investigators form York University Uzo Anucha (Social Work), Alison Griffiths (Education), Alison Fisher (York University)
Funder: SSHRC Insight Grant (2013-2017)
Project Description: Young people who feel unsafe and disconnected from their neighbourhoods are most likely to engage in violent or unsafe actions, themselves (McMurtry & Curling, 2008). Students designated as 'unsafe' through Ontario's Safe Schools legislation are pushed out of their neighbourhood schools through suspension, expulsion, and proactive relocation processes. In this way, Safe Schools and other institutional processes that are designed to mediate the unsafe behaviour of particular young people also serve to exclude these youth from their neighbourhoods and neighbourhood institutions, increasing the risk that the young person will engage in further violence. We are interested in how young people's transitions between programs and between systems influence their own experiences of safety and unsafety and their connections to their neighbourhoods, to community-based organizations, and to mainstream institutions. This study contributes to knowledge about the institutional processes through which individuals are identified as un-safe, and through which they are excluded within and from their neighbourhoods. This research advances knowledge in the area of leadership, community-academic research partnerships, and the coordination of integrated services for youth. Our overarching objective is to develop an inter-institutional protocol for the re-integration of marginalized youth into neighbourhoods and their schools.
Jijian Voronka
Title: Producing service user counternarratives to homelessness in Windsor’s downtown core
Researchers: Jijian Voronka (Principal Investigator), and co-investigators Eliza Chandler (Ryerson University), Adrian Guta (University of Windsor) and Carmen Logie (University of Toronto)
Research Assistants: Aman Ahluwalia, Tina Nguyen, and Grace Shaw
Funder: SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2018-2021)
Project Description: This research explores both efforts of urban revitalization and experiences of homelessness in Windsor’s downtown inner-city core. Public discourse about urban renewal efforts and homelessness in the downtown core have been dominated by local stakeholders (politicians, businesses, and homeowners). Homeless people living and accessing services in the downtown core have yet to collectively contribute to these narratives. The goal of this study is to address this knowledge gap by producing counternarrative knowledge generated by people experiencing homelessness in Windsor’s downtown core. Towards achieving this goal, this research works to 1) Document the recent iterations of the downtown inner-city core as a problemed site 2) Identify how social service users and community stakeholders spatially engage and relate to their surrounding community 3) Work with service users to engage and disseminate findings to promote cross-sector community building, development, and self-advocacy efforts. In addressing how smaller communities can respond to the emerging crisis of inequity, intended outcomes of this qualitative community-based research project are to develop service user-informed research, public relations strategies, and mobilize knowledge products generated by homeless communities.