 Luisa would like to introduce Dr. Alita Nandi. She will speak today about ethnic and racial harassment and mental health identifying sources of resilience. Dr. Nandi is a research fellow at the Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex. He conducts empirical research primarily about ethnicity and gender. He is interested in the formation and measurement of identity, discrimination, and harassment. She co-leads the ethnicity strand of understanding society. Dr. Nandi is the head of the U.K. U.K.'s largest household panel survey. He has co-authored a book titled A Practical Guide to Using Panel Data. With many ethnic minorities in England reporting harassment, this causes mental health problems. Using data from the panel survey, Dr. Nandi's research found different factors that aided resilience for first and second generation ethnic minorities. Luisa reminds us not to type or talk until the end. Dr. Nandi, when you're ready, please go ahead with your presentation. Hi, I'm Alita Nandi from the University of Essex. Thank you for inviting me and thank you, Luisa Hiram, for introducing me. I will talk about the findings from this project. My project team members are Rene Lutra, Nikhaela Benzoval, and Shamit Sagar. For over a decade, researchers have been trying to understand the reasons for poorer health of ethnic minorities as compared to the ethnic majority in a country, both physical and mental health. In this paper, James Snashru questions the hypothesis that this difference is due to inherent genetic or cultural differences across ethnic groups. He provides alternative explanations. These are basically differences in the life circumstances across ethnic groups. Many ethnic minority groups may have poorer economic outcomes than the white majority. For example, poverty economic hardship is expected to affect a person's health. So that could be one of the explanations. So as you can see in this slide, using data from a 1994 survey of British residents, James shows that the ethnic minorities living in households with no working member or working members in manual occupations are more likely to report poorer health than those in non-manual occupations. Next, he suggests that having the perception that you are the member of an ethnic group which is treated unfairly, considered to be of low status, may also affect one's health. Using data from the same survey, he shows that ethnic minorities who believe that most employers discriminate against their ethnic group member also report poorer health. Finally, he asks whether experiencing physical or verbal racial abuse also results in poorer health among ethnic minorities. And as you can see, using data from that same survey, he shows that that is the case. As expected, being victim of a physical attack has a stronger association with poorer health than verbal abuse. There have been a number of studies using UK data, mostly from the 1990s, which have also shown that there is an association between ethnic and racial harassment and poorer mental and physical health. A study using more recent data showed that this association was much stronger if ethnic and racial harassment is experienced repeatedly. So what do we do? In our project, we were interested in estimating the causal effect of ethnic and racial harassment on mental health, that is not just the association. By that, I mean while two phenomena may be correlated, it does not mean that one causes the other. Now earlier studies had shown that there is a correlation between racial harassment and mental health, but not if one caused the other. In this project, we also wanted to identify if there are any factors that protected people against this possibly negative effect. Finally, we wanted to know if not experiencing this harassment, but just being afraid of it also resulted in poor mental health. But before I start talking about the harassment and mental health, I want to talk a little about the prevalence of ethnic and racial harassment. How common is it? Let me first talk about measurement of ethnic and racial harassment. As you can see, there are a number of steps between an incident and the incident being reported to the police as a hate crime. As you can see, quite often the statistics we see in the media is about hate crimes. As I will show, this is an underestimate of the experiences of harassment faced by people. After an harassment incident occurs, the person who experiences this must be able to identify this as being driven by racial or ethnic discrimination. The survey data that we have used asks individuals about whether they have been physically or verbally abused and whether they think it is because of their ethnicity, religion or nationality, language or accent, dress or appearance, sex, sexual orientation or disability. The next step is to realize that this is a criminal act and should be reported to the police. Next, the person should feel comfortable enough to report it to the police. And finally one needs to know where to report this. After all of these steps are completed, this act gets recorded as a hate crime with the police. So we can see that hate crime police reports will be an underestimate of the actual experiences of ethnic and racial harassment. Now this is a look at the number of racially or religiously aggravated hate crimes around the time of Brexit. As you may remember, newspapers reported the spike in hate crimes right after the EU referendum, popularly known as Brexit. Now similar spikes are observed right after specific events. Now let's go to surveys. We use data from a UK survey called Understanding Society. In 2009 a sub-sample of the survey participants were asked about their experiences of harassment. Specifically we consider a person to have experienced ethnic and racial harassment if they said they were physically or verbally attacked in a public place in the last one year. And they think the reason for this was their ethnicity, religion or nationality. By public places we mean streets, shops, public transport stations and taxis and other places. Now in this project we only looked at those who are ethnic minorities. That is they chose their ethnic group as anything other than the white majority or white British. Now this figure here shows that what proportion of men and women in each ethnic group say they experienced ethnic and racial harassment in the last one year. As you can see this ranges from 7% to 17% across different ethnic and gender groups. Also notice that women are less likely to report experiencing harassment and I will talk about the possible reason for this in a little bit. But these reports are predicated on a person being in a public place and is able to identify an incident as ethnic and racial harassment and then feel confident to report it. We also asked people if they felt unsafe and avoided places and as you can see almost double the number of people said that was the case. And another thing to notice in this figure is that women are more likely to avoid and feel unsafe in a public place than men. And this possibly explains why women are less likely to report experiencing harassment as they tend to avoid being in those places because they feel unsafe. Now we also estimated models to find what factors affected the chances of experiencing ethnic and racial harassment in the last one year. We found that these following groups of people are more likely to report experiencing ethnic and racial harassment. That is men those who are younger than 60 years of age those who are more likely to participate in leisure activities people with higher educational qualification than the GCSE. So GCSE is the exam students take in the 10th grade. Now while it is expected that those who are participating in leisure activities will be in public places and so more likely to have such experience is unexpected that those who are more educated are more likely to experience ethnic and racial harassment. We also find that the high prevalence or the groups that experience ethnic and racial harassment more than other groups are Chinese, Pakistani and Indian Muslims. And those who are relatively less likely to experience are Indian non-Muslims Bangladeshi, Black Caribbean, Black African and mixed groups. We also found that ethnic minorities are more likely to experience harassment if they live in neighborhoods with lower proportion of their own ethnic group. So there may be some kind of safety in numbers. Also note that those who live in areas with high proportion of white British residents or areas with high proportion of UKIP or BNP voters in the 2010-2015 general elections are also more likely to experience harassment. And if you don't know UKIP and BNP parties are their political parties that are considered to have an overt or covert anti-immigrant and racist message. But interestingly there is no association with crime rates in the neighborhood. Now these are some scenarios to just give you an idea of the estimated likelihood of experiencing ethnic and racial harassment across different subgroups. For example 4 out of 100 ethnic minorities without any educational qualification are likely to report harassment but almost double the number that is 9 out of 100 ethnic minorities with GCSE or higher education are likely to report harassment. So this is just to give you an example of how big the differences are. And a few more scenarios I'll not talk more about it as you can see and a few more. Okay now I will talk about the relationship between experiences of ethnic and racial harassment and mental health. Now we measure mental health using a battery of 12 questions and these are known as the general health questionnaire or GHQ for short. These questions basically measure depression and anxiety. Based on these questions we derive an overall score which ranges from 0 to 36. Note a higher score means worse mental health. Now respondents are also asked 15 questions to measure the big 5 personality traits openness to experience conscientiousness, extraversion variableness and neuroticism. We control for these factors in models of mental health. All the existing studies we talked about either did not control for these factors sorry all the existing studies we talked about earlier did not control for these factors. Now as these are likely to be correlated with the likelihood of reporting harassment and mental health not accounting for it means the estimated association between harassment could have been partly reflecting the effect of personality traits on mental health. That is why our models provide better estimates of the causal effect of ethnic and racial harassment on mental health. Now when we estimate models of mental health we find that ethnic minority women are more likely to have worse mental health than men. Other groups with worse mental health are middle aged people people with lower incomes. Those who are unemployed as compared to employed those who are separated or divorced as compared to those in partnerships. Interestingly UK born ethnic minorities also refer to as the second generation report worse mental health than the first generation that is migrants. We also see that those who report ethnic and racial harassment report worse mental health than those who don't report such experiences. What is interesting is that this difference is 1.3 times the difference in mental health between employed and unemployed people. But we don't find any statistically significant difference in this relationship between first and second generation ethnic minorities. So next we ask whether there are individual or social factors that protect the mental health of ethnic minorities against the effect of ethnic and racial harassment. We do identify some such resilience or protective factors although what helps for the first generation may not be the same as what helps the second generation. For non UK born ethnic minorities that is the first generation what helps is the proportion of co-ethnic people in their neighborhood and the number of close friends they have. What helps for UK born ethnic minorities that is the second generation is having a stronger ethnic identity and having a higher proportion of friends of the same ethnic group. Now I want to finish the talk by talking about the ripple effect. Now I had shown this figure earlier. This figure shows the proportion of people ethnic minorities experiencing ethnic and racial harassment and those who say that they feel afraid or unsafe and avoid places. So what we want to know is if this wider group of people that is those who don't experience ethnic and racial harassment but just say they feel afraid and feel unsafe and avoid places do they also feel report a worse mental health. So that is why we call it the ripple effect and we find that is the case. The mental health cost is higher for those who actually experience ethnic and racial harassment but as we can see even those who don't experience it but just feel afraid also report a mental health cost albeit it's a bit lower than if you actually experienced it. For the first generation that is those who are born outside the UK feeling unsafe without experiencing the average is half as bad as experiencing it but for the second generation that is those who are born in the UK it is almost as bad. So again we see there is a generational difference in this ripple effect. We also want to see whether this ripple effect works via family members. So if you have not experienced ethnic and racial harassment does that matter, does that affect your mental health? Because in this survey we interview all household members we can do this exercise and as we can see amongst UK born ethnic minorities if a family member experiences ERH but they don't even then there is a small but significant mental health effect. So to conclude individuals reporting ethnic and racial harassment are not necessarily the most disadvantaged also the risk of harassment is positively associated with certain types of places there is a substantial association of ethnic and racial harassment with mental health there are also widespread ripple effects finally experiencing ethnic and racial harassment by a broad population of ethnic minorities with deleterious effects on mental health even amongst those who do not directly experience it and thank you for your time and attention. I can take questions now. Thank you. That is really important information for us in any nation we happen to be in even though your research was done in the UK and I want to thank you and I want to have our audience thank you for sharing your research with us it's very important I have a question to start you off you said two of the biggest factors for racial and ethnic minorities with a stronger ethnic identity and also having a higher proportion of friends with the same ethnic group don't you also apply to people with disabilities do you think people with disabilities would be more resilient if we have a stronger disability identity and if we have more friends with disabilities that is an interesting question so we have not looked at that specifically and we could look at to what extent so in these set of questions that we asked we asked about the one I'm talking about is ethnic and racial harassment but we also asked them whether they were physically or verbally attacked because of their disability so we could measure harassment due to disability but what we do not have are measures of identity associated with disability so I don't think we would be able to measure it in terms of so if you want me to guess sorry go ahead excuse me I would you measure the strength of disability identity so I would actually before we measured ethnic identity we did focus groups and we talked to people to understand how they saw themselves or what was important to their sense of who they were so we unfortunately did not do any focus groups about disability so the exact question was for ethnic identity was how important is your ethnic and racial background to your sense of who you are that was one way of measuring it the other was we asked them how important their parents ethnic group how important it was to them so there are two ways of measuring I mean there are many other ways but these are the two ways we use to measure ethnic identity for disability I would have to honestly say I would have to do focus groups and talk to people before saying anything you know I remember could we ask the audience here those two questions oh that would be very good yes please why don't you go back over to those tell us one question at a time so Electra can type that out for you okay how important is your disability to your sense of who you are that's a good question so we had asked on a scale of four from four being very important three was fairly important two was not important and one was not at all important look it's giving it a ten out of four okay that's four anybody else want to weigh in on that one how important is your disability to your sense of identity four being high and one being low I can type that four being very important three is fairly important do you do what I do give decimals no so the question is let me just type it Jennifer says she's accepted her disability as part of who she is she would not be who she is without it it's the same with mental illness yes okay so Alita one of the things I'm trying to show you is how easy it is to conduct focus groups in a virtual world I can see that that's exactly what I was thinking I had not thought of it at all this is really okay you had a second question Alita yeah the second question would it apply because that was for ethnic identity we also used the strength of identification with their parents ethnic group because ethnicity in that sense to some extent your ethnicity is inherited from your parents so it wouldn't work for disability would it well it might work for some disability some disabilities are inherited oh okay okay so yes so in that case so if one or more of your parents have the same disability as you do how strongly how important is that to you on a scale of 1 to 10 and our just asking the question do you mean how strongly does he identify with his parents who have the same disability no good things about focus group questions you have to do some focus groups first to refine the questions yes at this point I've not thought about it very well but no it's not exactly what orange is saying so it's not identifying with your parents I guess we had ordered the questions in that way because we didn't want to ask how strongly you identify with a particular ethnic group we didn't want to name it we said your parents ethnic group and that left it up to people to say yes this is my parents ethnic group do I identify with that ethnic group so it's not about your parents it's identifying the disability which your parents have do you identify with that disability again I wouldn't know whether this is the right way of asking because I've not thought about it and you would know more about it than I would that may be one that you can't ask parallel but I'm going to suggest we ask the audience how could we determine the strength of identification of someone as a person with a disability how would you determine that what measures would you use yes that would be good how would you measure how would you measure how strongly you identify as a person with a disability take this seriously Orange I want to encourage you to do research with us I would actually like to get um because I have never thought about because I've thought about identity on a lot of dimensions but possibly because nobody has mentioned this I've not thought about identity and disability I do want to know how you think of so it's not how important it is but how do you see yourself how important is it to your sense of who you are so some people in the audience were saying that I wouldn't be who I am without this that is what I want to know I wonder if it matters to you if you have a disability from birth would that make it more likely to identify with a disability or does it make any difference if you acquired your disability later looks as she thinks Orange's question is a lot to do with when you acquired the disability or were born with it or how much it impacts your life all that influences identification people who get to say about the late in life that is very weird do you folks who got your disability later in life feel that is true that is very interesting again because again I didn't think about this time dimension but this would be a research question this would be something we would have to ask a lot of people with variation so depending on when they have acquired at what stage in their life and how that matters of course first we need to measure it were there any other suggestions of how to measure disability identity we got a couple of comments here that might be useful looks as it also depends on the type of disability whether you got it from a disease or an accident or something else and whether it carries pain with it or not and other questions like that but those would be things you would need to ask and then Jennifer says she thinks a lot of it has to do with our perception and acceptance of our disability especially if it is a mental one and I'm wondering if there is a difference between visible and invisible disabilities and operative phoenix says milk might be onto something there her use is acquired later and she doesn't know what to think about her condition and I'm just talking in the reverse how many things does his disability affect yeah and treasure says her hearing loss was acquired in her 30s is not inherited however it's become a huge part of her identity she lives inside of it Jennifer says although I have accepted it and others see it at times in her life she's never used it as a barrier in any way there's a lot of good language here that you could use in questioning people exactly that's is it possible to get the script of this yeah do you use do you see your disability as a barrier and the more that people do the more that people don't does that help with different levels I mean identities measured across different dimensions so one of them is about your attitude towards the group the type of identity because some people would have positive attitudes some would incorporate a negative attitude that other people have towards that group that also matters yeah I think there's a lot to work with here from the discussion that we're having did anyone have any questions I know you asked a question when we were practicing that I thought was a good question for Elita do you remember that question it was a good one I think one question she asked was the increase in attacks after the Brexit would it disappear after a while was that the one yes because you were talking about spikes and you were saying there's some things that you think are causing the spikes once it's over with those spikes will disappear yes what we have seen is when these events happen there is a spike after that it does go down but at least based on the police reports we have not seen that it goes down to almost zero so there is a stable amount of ethnic and racial harassment that happens because based on the 1990s studies we had seen about one in ten experience it and now it's our studies based on the data from 2009 and the numbers are similar they're slightly lower for some groups but still it's about one in ten sorry I cannot hear the siren no siren the siren the siren is back on I don't think she intends to hear this oh okay no she doesn't intend to hear it it's in spanish mhm let's see on your mic is on okay any other questions for Arita she's been gracious enough help us understand many things today. Ah, here's Luke, observation. It is her belief that racism is extremely skewed towards the visual. You noted that four out of 100 ethnic minorities without any educational qualifications report harassment. In her own experience, you do not even need to open your mouth to get harassed. The aggressors have no idea what her educational level is, where to take care. Often they just take a look at her face and get nasty, be it with micro-aggressions like ignore the supermarket to and speak to my white husband or engage in more explicit harassment at calling her names. So is it visual? Is this usually visual? Yes, so actually when I was showing the differences by education level, what I actually was trying to say was because this, we asked people and they tell us. And what we think is people who are higher educated and more confident enough to report it. It's not that they are more likely to experience it. They're also more likely to be out in the public spaces possibly. So our measure has these two, either you can say shortcomings or points to keep in mind that is a person has to be in the public place to experience it. And they have to feel confident enough to report it because a lot of people who came to our advisory board, so we had non-academics in our advisory board who were advising us on our findings and methodology. So one thing they raised is quite often people don't report something that they have normalized. They expect it to happen. So they don't even think it's out of the ordinary event and hence don't report it. There is a link to an article in a UK newspaper and what it says is that people with disabilities expect to be harassed. They expect to be abused and has that expectation in our audience. Luke wonders if the aggressors could not see their victims would that know or change the level of racism? Partly, but also it comes from hearing. So language and accent. Although that happens just not for ethnic minorities but across regions because like in most countries in UK, different regions have different accents and I have talked to people who have said that when they go to a different region people often realize where they are from and sometimes they get harassed based on that. So just the accent, not racial or ethnic? No, that is why we could not include that in our measure because it was, I mean, obviously, if you're from a different country that is also a different accent, so that happens. But it also happens within the white majority when they come from different regions. James is wondering when he was growing up he was often attacked simply because he was the new guy in that area. Also there were times when he was attacked simply because he was white. How does that figure in here? He suspects that he lives like wolves, often attack anything with anyone who is different. That could be true. I mean, we've not looked at that but there are studies about bullying in schools and there they have found, so who have looked at who bullies and who gets bullied and it seems that happens both ways. But I honestly have not looked at that so I cannot comment. And Jennifer is saying she was picked on early in life in high school but by the time of graduation she built up the self-confidence and a different perception. I think she probably means perception of herself. She gained trust and respect from others. They knew how hard I worked to do so. That is interesting. What I would be interested if this were a focus group is to ask how she gained that because these are some of the resilience factors. So these kind of strength that you managed to have within you, sorry, yeah, so that's basically yeah. That's a whole research project in itself, isn't it? Yes. She's been stirred up and made fun of because she uses American Sign Language to communicate with her friends in the physical world or in certain settings she uses interpreters. So sometimes involving another person in your communication is the giveaway that you are different. Jennifer says acceptance is always only part of the equation. So Jennifer, you wanna share some things you think might be other parts of the equation? I'm sure Jerry is saying as a comment, it takes less effort and is more fun to just be nice to everybody if the world goes a long way. Jennifer says she built up a mentality and no nonsense attitude, not only that. Oh, she stood up for others who had disabilities for worse than hers. That is quite interesting because again, something not that we haven't looked at but others have looked at is once after you have experienced a racial attack, there are two things you can do. You can be proactive or you can not be proactive. But if you're proactive, your mental health improves. So this is quite interesting. Well, that is. It's good to hear from you, Elita, that what we experience as people with disabilities is somewhat similar to what people experience with other types of minority identification. Yes, it's good for me too. I mean, I've learned a lot here. Yes, I agree with Jennifer. Oh, do you have another question? No, no, I was just reading what Jennifer wrote and yes, I agree. Moe Casalho's thinking about writing papers. There is. Well, I think it's time to thank Elita. Dr. Maddi, you did a wonderful job of getting us thinking and thinking along with us. That's been a lot of fun. And we'd love to have you come back and talk with us again and share more of your research. I will, I will contact you. It has been a real good learning experience. Thank you very much for inviting me.