How are we studying migrant well-being?: A critical view from a liberating community psychology approach

Abstract

The improvement of migrant population well-being is both a goal in itself as well as a necessary component for achieving a cohesive multicultural society. To contribute to this challenge, this work (a) reviews how migrant well-being has been studied by mainstream psychology; (b) assesses its development from a critical view; and (c) proposes theoretical and methodological approaches to analyze this phenomenon from a more comprehensive perspective. Thus, we emphasize the need for developing analyses which explore the impact of oppressive contextual factors on migrants’ well-being. These analyses must go beyond individual and culturalist perspectives and consider migrants as active agents who struggle and transform the context along their acculturation process. Furthermore, these analyses have to produce specific proposals to improve migrants’ well-being. In order to achieve the former, a liberating community psychology approach together with the use of innovative methodologies of analysis (i.e. multilevel analysis and system dynamics) is proposed as the appropriate framework and tools for overcoming the mentioned challenges.