Psychological distress, employment, and family functioning during the COVID-19 outbreak among recent immigrant families in Israel: Moderating roles of COVID-19 prevalence

Tae Kyoung Lee; Maya Benish-Weisman; Saskia R Vos; Maria Fernanda Garcia; Maria C Duque Marquez; Ivonne A Calderón; Tatiana Konshina; Einat Elizarov; Seth J Schwartz

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0277757

Psychological distress, employment, and family functioning during the COVID-19 outbreak among recent immigrant families in Israel: Moderating roles of COVID-19 prevalence

PLoS One. 2022 Nov 17;17(11):e0277757. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0277757. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Tae Kyoung Lee¹, Maya Benish-Weisman², Saskia R Vos³, Maria Fernanda Garcia⁴, Maria C Duque Marquez⁵, Ivonne A Calderón³, Tatiana Konshina², Einat Elizarov⁶, Seth J Schwartz⁵

Affiliations

¹ Department of Child Psychology and Education / Convergence for Social Innovation, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
² Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel.
³ Department of Public Health Sciences, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Miami, Florida, United States of America.
⁴ Department of Community Well-being, University of Miami, Miami, FL, United States of America.
⁵ Department of Educational Psychology, University of Texas, Austin, TX, United States of America.
⁶ Department of Counseling and Human Development, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.

Abstract

Grounded in an ecodevelopment perspective, in the current study we examined unique and moderating effects of daily COVID-19 prevalence (social contexts) on effects of COVID-19 related risk and protective factors such as emotional distress (individual contexts) and employment (working from home and unemployment status; family contexts) on family functioning among 160 recent immigrant families in Israel. In general, results indicate several unique effects of COVID-19 related factors (such as COVID-19 emotional distress, unemployment, and remote work arrangements) on both parents' and adolescents' reports of family functioning. However, results indicated that there were more significant associations between COVID-19 factors (e.g., emotional distress and COVID-19 prevalence) and family functioning indicators with adolescents, than with parents. The effects of COVID-19 factors (e.g., emotional distress and remote work arrangements) were moderated by daily COVID-19 prevalence (new cases and deaths). We discuss ways in which interventionists can contribute to pandemic-related research to promote optimal family functioning among immigrant families.

Copyright: © 2022 Lee et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Adolescent
COVID-19* / epidemiology
Disease Outbreaks
Emigrants and Immigrants*
Employment
Humans
Israel / epidemiology
Prevalence
Psychological Distress*

Grants and funding

This project is supported by the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF) (2018091). Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the BSF. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.