The quality of life of women of Chinese origin

This paper draws upon qualitative data to explore the quality of life of Chinese mothers with preschool children in the central part of Manchester. In doing this it considers their own self‐reported health conditions. Both semi‐structured and conversational face‐to‐face interviews were used with mothers in their homes. The names of Chinese mothers were drawn from the immunization records of the Health Authority and Hospital Trust of Central Manchester. The final interview sample of 30 had a Chinese surname in the record. ‘Lee’ as a surname was excluded because it was used both by Chinese and English people. The mothers’ socio‐economic background and their quality of life in terms of work conditions and leisure, housing and residential environment, marital support and life satisfaction were examined. The findings indicate that since they settled in the United Kingdom, the women have been under great psychological stress from a variety of sources. These sources included hardship and overwork, poverty and deprivation, poor social support and social isolation, unhappy family relationships, gambling husbands and domestic violence, together with language and cultural difficulties. All of these contributed to poor quality of living standards as well as indirectly causing negative psychosocial health outcomes. The unsatisfactory self‐reported health conditions and poor quality of life of Chinese mothers were naturally interrelated and might be determined by the disadvantages of migration. However, the mothers themselves expressed little satisfaction with the health services and it may be that improvements are necessary in this area to ameliorate some of the disadvantages of migration. Copyright © 2000 Blackwell Science Ltd.