Quality of life among families of color in Minnesota

Completing the picture

Martha Rueter might have been spotted at cafes all across the Twin Cities over the past three years, but she wasn’t just sampling salads and sandwiches. Instead, Rueter, an associate professor family social science, spent three years lunching with a wide range of community leaders to lay the groundwork for an unprecedented study of what it takes for families to live a good life in a diverse Minnesota.

Rueter is part of an interdisciplinary and multicultural research team—along with family social science colleagues Jean Bauer, Kathryn Rettig, William Turner, and Virginia Zuiker—that is proving what quality of life means to the many African American, American Indian, Asian American, and Hispanic families who call Minnesota home. Can a working-class Hispanic family living on the West Side of St. Paul enjoy as satisfying a quality of life as an affluent African American or Asian American family in southwest Minneapolis? How abou5 an impoverished Native American family in Red Lake and a middle-class European American family in Bloomington?

The answers probably are far from simple, suspects Rueter, who notes that “almost all quality-of-life assessment tools used today were developed to look at individuals, not families—and most were created by white researchers studying European Americans.”

Data gaps

The study led by Rueter and her colleagues—“Tracking Changes in Quality of Life among Minnesota’s Diverse Families”—is a comprehensive, longterm effort to fill some vital data gaps.

The project team is keenly aware that study after study has found that Minnesotans as a whole enjoy a good quality of life compared to folks in other states. In the past few years, flattering book and magazine profiles have lauded Minnesota as one of the best places in the country to raise children (Child and Working Mother magazines), start or expand a business (Expansion Management), or enjoy the arts (Places Rated Almanac). And for three straight years, a national research outfit, Morgan Quitno Press, has rated Minnesota one of the two “most livable” states, based on 43 factors it said “reflect the standard of living that Americans want [including] high home ownership rates, job growth, strong education, and low crime rates.”

“We have a lot of this kind of snapshot information about quality of life—assessing indicators such as the percentage of people who finished high school or own homes, the number of teen pregnancies, this income level, that rate of heart disease, this number of people doing well in that area or this,” Rueter says. But what researchers and policymakers don’t know, she says, is startling.

“We don’t know a lot about the quality of life for families as opposed to individuals. We know almost nothing about how quality of life is defined and experienced among minority racial and ethnic groups in Minnesota—even though the nonwhite population is now about 12 percent of our population and growing. And most important from a policy perspective, we don’t know much about long-term quality of life—what improves or lessens it over time.”

Plugging those information gaps requires broad and deep community collaboration, Rueter emphasizes. That’s the reason the project team has spent almost three years meeting with community leaders and with groups ranging from social services professionals who work with African American families to American Indian tribal leaders.

“There’s a different mindset needed to do fully engaged, community-building research, and it starts with lots and lots of dialogue,” Turner says. “We’re establishing relationships of mutual trust, finding ways we can pull together. And then we listen. The dialogues also shake loose our biases—academic, disciplinary, or cultural—which is absolutely crucial.”

The first step: to identify significant components of quality of life among African Americans, American Indians, Asian Americans, and Hispanics. That, in turn, will lay the foundation for annual interviews with 25 families from each community—not only to capture in detail their perceptions about family well-being, but also, Rueter says, to track “how and why families’ quality of life shifts over time, including the ‘little things along the way’ that precipitate bigger shifts.”

The study will help policymakers understand what “quality of life” means in an increasingly diverse Minnesota and how to build on family and community strengths to improve quality of life. For researchers, the results will be equally useful, Rueter says, leading to new models and paradigms that better fit the realities of a diverse society.

Eye-opening dialogue

What the project researchers are hearing most clearly, says Rueter, is that “the things traditionally associated with a high quality of life may not necessarily be on the same place on the list—or on the list at all—for families from nonmajority cultures.”

For example, she says, “We’re learning that for many ethnic groups, spiritual beliefs play a really important role in how families experience quality of life.” And among Southeast Asians, particularly for the Hmong, “having a lot of children may be a more important indicator of quality of life than other indicators, such as income. We don’t know that for sure, but we’re hearing from the community that large family size is one aspect of a good life. That’s not something you typically see on most quality-of-life surveys.”

Discrimination and other forms of oppression also may play a major role in shaping the quality-of-life experiences of minority families, Rueter says. Among Native Americans, whose history and culture have been profoundly affected by loss on many levels, what community leaders describe as “historical grief” may have a great impact on quality-of-life perceptions.

For the researchers, the key challenge will be to develop questions that are well-informed and culturally appropriate, but also as open-ended as possible. Questions need to take into account the variation within cultural groups, Rueter notes. “Asian Americans may be Korean or Chinese or Hmong, just for starters—three groups with very different cultural histories. And many Mexican Americans have been here far longer than my own family, while others may have just arrived as migrant laborers.”

Precisely how questions are asked may be pivotal. Rueter notes that many studies use scales—from “not at all satisfied” to “very satisfied,” for example—to record subjects’ responses. Yet the very notion of a continuum is foreign to cultures such as the Hmong.

“At least with Hmong who have not adopted U.S. ways of thinking, we may need to ask yes-or-no questions, and then follow up to find out ‘how much yes’ or ‘how much no,’” Rueter says. “That’s something we wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for our extensive conversations with the Southeast Asian community.”

Developing leaders

Much of the field work will be done by the project’s small corps of graduate student assistants—among them students who are American Indian, Korean American, Hmong, and African American, as well as Northern European. For them, the “Minnesota Diverse Families” project is an apprenticeship, Rueter says. “One of the goals we have for this project is to develop a multicultural base of leaders within the community. Working with community folks to define the research agenda is one way of doing that. But we’re a teaching organization—a big part of our mission is to mentor students as future leaders in their own rights.”

Herb Grant was so interested in what the project could teach him about working with urban American Indian families that he signed on to the project as an unpaid research assistant. Grant, a Ph.D. student in the marriage and family therapy program, is called upon to work with many urban American Indian clients as a licensed family therapist at the Community- University Health Care Center (CUHCC).

“My own experience of American Indian culture is quite different from the experience of someone who grew up in Minneapolis or on a reservation,” says Grant, who is half Tlingit Indian and grew up on an island in southeast Alaska. Even as he is broadening his cultural competence, he also has used his community ties to open doors for the research team, and he has contributed valuable perspectives of his own to project planning discussions, Rueter says.

During one weekly meeting of the research team, Grant observed that retirement saving as a quality-of-life measure may need to be looked at in a different way in the context of Native American culture. Recalls Grant: “I mentioned that many American Indians I knew had shoeboxes of money stashed away, or were investing in their grandkids as a way of ensuring they themselves will be taken care of. I’m not sure you’d get at that if you asked a straightforward question about retirement saving.”

Policy tool

The Minnesota Diverse Families project—which is part of University President Bob Bruininks’ interdisciplinary initiative on children, youth, and families—couldn’t be more timely, Rueter emphasizes. As a project intended to increase knowledge of family issues and to support enlightened public policies benefiting families, it perfectly dovetails with the objectives of The International Year of the Family, a United Nations initiative now celebrating its 10th anniversary.

And given the rapid demographic changes taking place in Minnesota, “We simply need to have a much more complex picture of family and community strengths and challenges,” Rueter says. “Up to now, we’ve generally taken things we learned from Northern European families who are doing really well and tried to apply them to diverse groups. That doesn’t always work.”

Underscoring that observation, Turner—whose work often has focused on substance abuse prevention— notes that the drug-and-alcohol prevention program DARE was effective among white young people, but a dismal failure among kids of color. “It relied on police officers to come into schools to deliver prevention messages. That worked in white communities, where cops are generally looked up to, but not always in African American and Latino communities.”

Teen pregnancy prevention programs, too, have missed the mark in communities of color, Turner says. Minnesota has the lowest teen pregnancy rate for whites and among the highest for blacks—“yet we’re using the same strategies for both groups,” he observes. “Some research suggests that programs are more effective with African American youth if they are set up in churches or other places on community ‘turf.’ But there may be other factors. We do know that race, culture, and ethnicity clearly make a difference. But we don’t always know just how.”

Says Rueter: “Looking through the eyes of families themselves, what makes for a good quality of life? What factors or processes help or hinder family well-being? What are the family and cultural and community strengths that we can build on across Minnesota? From a policymaking perspective, once we know that—and we will—we’ll be well on the way.”

Originally printed in the fall 2004 issue of Kaleidoscope