Coping, surviving, or thriving: A scoping review examining social support for migrant care workers through four theoretical lenses

Rationale

Migrant care workers (MCWs) play a crucial role in addressing healthcare workforce shortages in many developed countries. Existing reviews document the significant challenges MCWs face—such as language barriers, interpersonal discrimination, and sexual harassment—and describe the social support that MCWs receive, but ambiguous application and heterogeneous measurement of theoretical constructs have thus far precluded researchers from deriving generalizable insights about how various types of social support positively and negatively impact MCWs’ well-being. Therefore, we conducted a scoping review on this topic and organized the literature using four theoretical perspectives on social support.

Objective

To synthesize interdisciplinary research on social support for MCWs and extend existing reviews, we conducted a scoping review of 56 empirical studies to understand how these studies conceptualize and operationalize social support for MCWs and the theoretical and methodological approaches they adopt.

Findings

Our findings suggest that scholars have implicitly and explicitly adopted a wide array of theoretical perspectives (e.g., stress and coping, social constructivism), with few studies engaging theories in substantive ways. The reviewed studies have demonstrated both positive and negative implications of social support for MCWs' well-being. However, these studies heavily focus on the social support MCWs receive, whereas the negative impacts of MCWs' unmet support needs remain under-investigated. Although empirical studies use diverse methodologies to study this topic, most quantitative studies approach social support from a stress and coping perspective. We advocate for researchers conducting quantitative studies to adopt a critical consciousness and work toward statistically modeling how the intersectionality of MCWs' identities and the multi-level nature of MCWs’ power positions within their social networks may impact whether MCWs successfully obtain the support they need to thrive.