Ming-Cheng Miriam Lo’s poverty related research focuses on the
health care experiences of low-income immigrants.
Her on-going projects include research on why different immigrant
groups develop varying coping strategies for inadequate care, how
healthcare challenges gender identities among immigrant women,
and whether children of low-income immigrants, as assimilated
adults, continue to struggle with issues of mistrust in
healthcare professionals.
Lo is the author of Doctors within Borders: Profession,
Ethnicity, and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan (University of
California Press, 2002). She has published in the Sociology of
Health and Illness, Health, Sociological Theory, Politics and
Society, Theory and Society, and has recently co-edited the
Handbook of Cultural Sociology (Routeldge, 2010).
Her research has been funded by the Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation, the American Sociological Association, the CCK
Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, and the UC Davis
Humanities Institute. From 2008 to 2011, Lo served on the Council
of the Comparative and Historical Sociology Section at the
American Sociological Association. She serves on the editorial
board for the journal Sociological Theory and will be joining the
editorial board of Contemporary Sociology in 2012.
Lo received her degree in Sociology from the University of
Michigan in 1996.
2266 Social Sciences and Humanities Building
Davis, CA
Hospitals and clinics frequently rely on bicultural healthcare
workers as cultural brokers to offer translation and other
assistance to help low-income immigrant patients overcome
cultural barriers to healthcare. In a new study, we find that
Spanish-bilingual nurses navigate complex relationships with
their Latino patients in medical institutions with assorted
regulations and often limited resources. They do so by developing
diverse care strategies.
In the U.S., low-income immigrants are disproportionately
excluded from social services. Even those who have gained formal
access must often overcome informal institutional barriers. In a
new study, I interviewed low-income Mexican immigrant mothers
with limited English skills to understand these informal barriers
in education and healthcare settings as they advocated on behalf
of their children. The study suggests that mothers are most
effective in a less bureaucratized setting and when staff
recognize how deeply they care for and understand their children.
En EE.UU., inmigrantes de bajos recursos son desproporcionalmente
excluidos de servicios sociales. Aún los que obtienen acceso
formal muchas veces tienen que enfrentarse con barreras
informales. Yo entrevisté madres mexicanas inmigrantes de bajos
recursos con conocimiento limitado de inglés para entender las
barreras informales en ambientes escolares y de salud mientras
abogaban para sus hijos. Encuentro que madres son lo más eficaz
en un ambiente menos burocratizado y cuando el personal reconoce
que las madres se interesan y entienden a sus hijos.
In recent years, ethnic concordance—matching the ethnicity of
healthcare workers to that of their patients—has been promoted as
an important measure for achieving “patient-centered care” for
minority patients in the U.S.
