The UTC Graduate School is pleased to announce that Amira Marquez Moreno will present Master's research titled,  Understanding the experience of immigrant workers: a qualitative examination of work demands, resources, and barriers to achieving optimal well-being on 03/08/2024 at 1:00 PM in 540 McCallie, Room 394. Everyone is invited to attend. 

Psychology

Chair: Dr. Kristen Black

Co-Chair: Dr. Ruth Walker

Abstract:

Latino immigrants often work in risky occupations with high social, role-related, physical, and psychological demands. While Industrial and Organizational Psychology and other disciplines are trying to understand the working experience of this population, immigrants continue battling against these challenges at their jobs. The proposed research aimed to identify some of the demands, resources, and barriers Latino immigrants experienced using four focus groups with a sample of 24 participants. The participants were ??recruited through snowball sampling with the inclusion criteria of being at least 18 years old, working at a manual labor job, and working in the United States for at least one year. The participants answered a semi-structured interview assessing perceived challenges at work, current and desired perceived resources, and barriers to accessing those resources to protect well-being. After conducting a thematic analysis, it was found that immigrant workers experienced daily demands at the social, role-related, psychological, and physical levels. Some of these demands included moral injury, discrimination; workload, time pressure; learned helplessness and lack of mental recovery; and a series of physical and environmental work hazards. Some of the barriers mentioned were language barriers, lack of training and hazard prevention, and misinformation about the immigration processes. Some resources included building self-efficacy, social support in the workplace, immigration readiness, and resilience. It is recommended that future research assess other occupations not accounted for by this research and use quantitative methods to understand the positive work experience for immigrant workers in the USA.