Does language ecology in Québec modulate COVID-19 health access or outcomes?

The COVID19 pandemic suggests that language barriers impact access to health-related information and medical outcomes in Québec at societal and individual levels. The Association for Canadian Studies recently reported that English minority speakers in Québec have greater COVID19-linked anxieties and distrust of Québec Provincial pandemic governmental policies, compared to French majority speakers. Currently unclear is what gives rise to these differences, and how language barriers impact both personal attitudes and societal public health outcomes regarding the pandemic. Guided by sociolinguistic and psychological theory, reseachers will investigate several factors including people’s language experience, interpersonal networks, community contexts, and society-level constraints. We will use cutting edge social network analyses and statistical modelling approaches to analyze large-N, language-tagged, COVID19 questionnaire data from Anglophone and Francophone respondents across Quebec, particularly in Montreal. The team, comprised of language scientists, social psychologists, and big data scientists, is uniquely qualified to address these urgent questions. This work will generate important, timely knowledge and student training opportunities about language barriers faced by English minority speakers that are relevant to COVID19 health access and public health outcomes in Quebec.

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Outputs:

• Hernández-Rivera, E., Gullifer, J. W., & Titone, D. (2022). Socioecological and psycholinguistic approaches to multilingual health literacy. Translational Issues in Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1037/tps0000325

• Hernández-Rivera, E., Gullifer, J. W., & Titone, D. (2022). Socioecological and psycholinguistic approaches to multilingual health literacy.Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 8(2), 197–209. https://doi.org/10.1037/tps0000325

• Hernández-Rivera, E., Marco S. G., Ahia, M., Tiv, M., Knäuper, B., Johns, B. T., Doucerain, M., & Titone, D. (In prep). Does language ecology in Québec modulate COVID19 health access or outcomes?

• Ahia, M., Hernandez-Rivera, E., Titone, D. (2021). Do Language Use Affiliations Predict Health Outcomes? COVID-19 Publich Health Outcomes in Linguistic Majority and Minority Populations in Montreal. [poster presentation]. Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec.

• Hernández-Rivera, E., Marco S. G., Ahia, M., Tiv, M., Knäuper, B., Johns, B. T., Doucerain, M., & Titone, D. (2021). Language-Use and COVID-19 Outcomes: Exploring Population Data Across Two Canadian Cities. Presentation at the Dialogue McGill Annual Conference of 2021. Montreal, Canada.

• Hernández-Rivera, E. (2021) Invited Speaker: Experiencias en el uso de datos censales para estudiar de la distribución de COVID-19 en Canadá. Segundo Encuentro de Egresados de la Facultad de Medicina y Psicología. Department of Medicine and Psychology, Autonomous University of Baja California, Baja California, México.