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Project Leads

Shintaro Kono

Team Members
Salima Meherali, Elizabeth Onyango, Megumi Tokuda

Cluster: Immigrant Adolescent and Youth Health

Canadian governments direct immigrants to rural areas to address shrinking labourer and population issues. However, often rural areas lack resources to support immigrants, while also having unique local factors that pose extra barriers to immigrants’ integration into communities. In rural Canada, immigrant youths must navigate a myriad of challenges related to identity, relationships, and mental health to pursue well-being.

The objective of this project is to co-create a mobile app-based intervention to enhance well-being holistically among immigrant youths who live in rural Alberta. Through a community-based participatory research (CBPR) design, immigrant youths, professionals, and researchers will work together to identify key topics to be addressed in such an intervention, while also aligning the app and intervention characteristics with unique needs of immigrant youths in rural Alberta. Capitalizing on the interdisciplinary expertise in the project team, the intervention will address the well-being of immigrant youths in a holistic manner, including the aspects of leisure, sexual and reproductive health, physical and mental health, as well as culture.

1. How do immigrant youths in rural Alberta define holistic well-being? 
2. What does an app-based intervention to support it look like?

The overall design is community-based participatory research. Theoretically, the project is guided by ecological systems theory and intersectionality. The project has two phases. First, an online focus groups (N = 40) with immigrant youths and supporting professionals in rural Alberta to explore their lived experiences around well-being, rurality, immigration/integration, and mobile apps. Focus group data will be analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis. Second, a research advisory board with volunteer youths, professionals, and researchers. A series of board meetings will be used to narrow down key app content topics and app features, identify priority areas, visualize mock-ups, and test alpha versions. As an app platform, Pathverse’s code-free intervention app builder service will be used.

• MYPEER
• Community Gardening for Cultural Food Security and Mental Wellbeing

This project is in the planning phase.

Well-being, rurality, youth, mobile app, immigrant