2001/2002 PCERII Funded Research Abstract

Using a large-scale representative sample of 7,115 women, the study will examine an anomalous finding from our earlier project on violence against immigrant women in Canada. As we had hypothesized in our earlier investigation, immigrant women from developing countries were shown to experience the highest prevalence of violence. Surprisingly, however, immigrant women from developed countries were found to experience less violence than both immigrant women from developing countries and Canadian born women. The specific objective of this study, then, is to understand why immigrant women from developed countries have such a low prevalence of violence. The theoretical framework for the study is a reformulation of Nested Ecological Theory. Reformulating this framework will make it pertinent to the special context of immigrants from developed countries. Data analyses will begin with descriptive comparisons of bivariate relationships. Analyses will then proceed to multivariate comparisons using multinomial regression. In so doing, we hope that various stakeholders will be in a better position to address the problem of violence against women in Canada, particularly for the most affected group; immigrant women from developed countries.