Building Bridges and Mending Fences: Cultural Conflict and Cultural Brokering between Academic and Immigrant Communities

Abstract

Our objective is to illustrate how to create and maintain a healthy flow of carefully curated communication between a research team and a community of interest using the principles of cultural brokering. We begin with a brief critical review of the existing literature on cultural brokering between immigrant and academic communities. We follow this review with a case study of cultural brokering between a research team at Tulane University and the Vietnamese American immigrant community in New Orleans. We draw upon specific examples from an ongoing collaboration to illustrate types of cultural conflict that are common to academic and community collaborations, and we discuss how different types and features of cultural brokering have helped to resolve these conflicts and keep the project(s) moving forward. We summarize a set of traits, potential roles/contributions, and training and operating strategies for a cultural broker.

Keywords

field work health disparities immigrant health community-based research

Introduction

Conducting research that focuses on unfamiliar populations presents a set of opportunities and challenges that are distinct from those that arise during projects that focus on communities that are better known to members of the research team. Opportunities to gain new insights into an unfamiliar culture and to collaborate in efforts to improve the lives of members of such communities who are struggling make such research especially rewarding. Venturing into unfamiliar cultural terrain also poses special risks for misunderstandings that can annoy members of the community, lead to invalid conclusions, imperil the research enterprise and the application of findings, and perhaps make things worse than they were before such an ill-fated project began.

Conducting research on immigrant communities often presents such opportunities and challenges. For example, cultural barriers in accessing health care may result in suboptimal health outcomes, and well-conceived and well-executed research that addresses such barriers can significantly improve quality of life for many members of the community. In our experience, a principal feature that distinguishes well-conceived and well-executed research from projects that falter is a healthy flow of communication between the research team and key members of the community under study. Initiating and maintaining such healthy flows of information can be challenging when members of the research team and members of the community live their lives mostly within separate cultural worlds that have distinct histories, goals, and expectations. Many members of immigrant communities have lived histories of exploitation by authority figures, and many living in such communities may value communication styles that employ subtlety, nuance, and deference and that are designed to foster smooth social interaction and avoid conflict. Many members of academic communities have lived histories of privilege and entitlement, and often value communication styles that employ directness and confrontation, and that are designed to elicit correct and precise factual information and crisp falsifiable hypotheses. No wonder that members from these two distinct cultural worlds can sometimes find each other exasperating.

One way to bridge the gulf between these two cultural worlds is to apply some of the concepts and principles of cultural brokering, including in some cases the recruitment and training of a cultural broker. A cultural broker is a person who facilitates “bridging, linking, or mediating between groups or persons of differing cultural backgrounds for the purpose of reducing conflict or producing change” (Jezewski and Sotnik 2001).

Materials and Methods

We begin with a brief critical review of the existing literatures relevant to cultural brokering between immigrant and academic communities. We follow this review with a case study of cultural brokering between a research team at Tulane University and the Vietnamese American immigrant community in New Orleans.

Results

A Critical Review of the Literatures Related to Cultural Brokering

Culture is complicated. While its definition is simple enough—“symbolic systems of beliefs, values, and shared understandings that render the world meaningful and intelligible for a particular group of people” (Beldo 2010)—its complexity arises not only from its abstractness but also because it interacts with many other features of social structure and in a way that is dynamic rather than static. Culture is complicated by power, and its deployment by earlier generations of academics and other powerful elites to oversimplify complex topics such as poverty encumbers the concept with a fraught history (Calhoun 2002), and yet, culture (the concept) endures due to the widely recognized importance of how shared histories shape our interpretations of the world around us.¹

Cultural brokering has been addressed, at least tangentially, across a broad spectrum of work focusing on health care service provision and community-engaged research for more than three decades. Cultural—or knowledge—brokers are often

paid staff whose focus is linking community agencies with researchers and facilitating their interaction so that they are able to better understand each other’s goals and professional cultures, influence each other’s work, forge new partnerships, and promote the use of the research-based evidence in decision-making. (Benoit et al. 2011)

Cultural brokers can also be “paraprofessionals, settlement workers, bilingual co-workers, diversity liaisons, and bi-cultural members within an ethnic community group” (Brar-Josan and Yohani 2019:2). Cultural brokers facilitate interactions between research teams and their partners working in health care settings and community-based organizations (CBOs) in a variety of ways and at each stage of the collaboration.

At the outset of a new project, cultural brokers can help bring together appropriate members of diverse stakeholder groups to pursue joint goals (Jezewski and Sotnik 2001; Lefley and Bestman 1991). One potential source of cultural conflict that is characteristic of this initial stage of a collaborative project between a research team and a CBO relates to differences in the goals of academic and community institutions, and thus of the individuals who work for these institutions. This is especially the case when research goals are basic rather than applied. An applied research project often poses little risk of conflict related to goals as both teams seek the same outcome in the end, for example, better access to care for the subgroup of interest. But basic science research² is fundamental to the mission of an academic institution and is essential for scientific progress, from which all of society benefits. CBO leaders may struggle to understand why they should advocate for a study that does not benefit their community in immediate and tangible ways. A cultural broker can help to initiate and moderate these difficult conversations as the two groups explore potential avenues for mutual benefit.

Once a new project partnership is underway, a cultural broker can help to nurture this new relationship so that the combined teams effectively pursue the joint goals that were negotiated (Lefley and Bestman 1991; Lomas 2007). At this stage, sophisticated bilingual skills and understandings of both surface and deep meanings in the cultural symbols (Geertz 1972) of both groups can help with the communication of complex or culturally nuanced messages to both audiences. Cultural brokers can help the two groups avoid conflicts or at least mediate conflicts as they arise (Pinsoneault et al. 2019; VanLandingham 2015). Explaining to community leaders and research participants the necessity of seemingly tedious and legalistic documents to record informed consent can be helped along by a savvy cultural broker, as can the important differences between confidential and anonymous information. A cultural broker can also help to explain to community leaders why two researchers on the same team might be so direct in their disagreements with each other on a scientific point and that such directness does not imply disrespect but rather is an element of the culture of academia. Working in the other direction, the cultural broker can help to redirect culturally misguided efforts by researchers or clinicians that are doomed to failure.³

Finally, near the end of a joint project involving a research team and an immigrant community, a cultural broker can help to guide the dissemination, interpretation, and utilization of the project’s findings and recommendations (Benoit et al. 2011; Brar-Josan and Yohani 2019; Jezewski and Sotnik 2001; Meyer 2010; Pinsoneault et al. 2019; VanLandingham 2015). Not only will the dissemination material need to be accurately and thoughtfully translated into lay (non-scientific) language, these materials will also likely need to be accurately and thoughtfully translated into the language of the community of interest and communicated in a way that is culturally appropriate. Stumbles over subtle and nuanced meanings of words, symbols, and even colors can disrupt or even derail a project if such mistakes are not addressed in a quick, humble, and sincere manner. At this stage in the collaboration, a cultural broker can also help the community leverage the research findings for their own benefit. Brar-Josan and Yohani (2019) describe how a broker might work with a local religious leader to interpret research findings in such a way that it helps explain the benefits of mental health services to the families of refugee youth who might need it and work with providers to find culturally appropriate ways to communicate with their clients (Brar-Josan and Yohani 2019).⁴

This brief review of existing research related to cultural brokering illustrates fairly widespread acknowledgment that a cultural broker can, at least in theory, be valuable at different stages of a research project involving an academic team and a community made up of immigrants or some other non-mainstream or marginalized members. However, little has been written that specifically illustrates how a cultural broker can be effectively used in practice to address problems that commonly arise in collaborations between academic and immigrant communities. We address this gap in the literature with the following case study to illustrate cultural brokering within a series of studies undertaken by a research team based at Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and a variety of community partners in New Orleans’ Vietnamese immigrant community.

Case Study of Cultural Brokering—The Tulane/Village de l’Est Collaboration

The Setting and Brief History of the Collaboration

Our research team’s relationship with the Vietnamese immigrant community in New Orleans began with their arrival in 1975 when the initial refugees fleeing the collapse of South Vietnam began to arrive in the United States. One of our academic team members was active in the city’s initial efforts to resettle the new arrivals in apartments in Eastern New Orleans. Another team member worked in the refugee camps in the countries of first refuge in Southeast Asia during the early 1980s. These early relationships established familiarity, trust, and goodwill that facilitated the launching of our current set of studies that focus on immigrant adaptation and well-being (Fu and VanLandingham 2010, 2012a, 2012b) and disaster recovery (Do et al. 2009; VanLandingham 2017; Vu et al. 2009; Vu and VanLandingham 2012; Zhang and Pendley 2017) that began during the early 2000s. More recently, our research team has begun to explore aging and caregiving for the aged within this immigrant enclave, and especially the effect of COVID-19 on such caregiving.

Building Bridges: Investments in Cultural Brokering

We see cultural brokering as a process and an essential component of a long and successful relationship between an academic team and a community of interest. The early efforts by our colleagues to not only assist Vietnamese refugees in tangible ways but also immerse themselves in the existing literatures on Vietnam, the Vietnamese, and Vietnamese Americans demonstrated a level of commitment that led the community to take the Tulane-based research team seriously. We continue to take concrete steps to ensure that this relationship remains solid. We show up regularly at community events and co-sponsor them when we can. Several of us pursue Vietnamese language study. We contract with a professional artist to incorporate Vietnamese symbols and imagery (and of course Vietnamese language) into original artwork for our communications with the community, for example, in the New Year (Tết) cards that we send to all of our study participants and to our community partners (see Figure 1), and in our brochures and summary sheets that highlight our research findings, community service, and upcoming research activities (see Figure 2).

Figure 1.

Most recent Tết card: Year of the Rat (2020).

Figure 2.

Announcement of upcoming field work and highlighting our community service.

Mending Fences: Brokering of Cultural Conflict

Misunderstandings, disagreements, and errors occur in nearly every research project. Such mishaps can become consequential when they are complicated by different sets of histories, assumptions, norms, and understandings held by members from very different cultural backgrounds. In this section, we illustrate with concrete examples three general types of cultural conflict noted in the literature review above that are common to academic and community collaborations. We discuss how different types and features of cultural brokering have helped our team to resolve—or at least mitigate—these conflicts and keep the project(s) moving forward.

Basic versus applied research—what’s in it for the community?

Much of our research in the community thus far has been basic rather than applied. While the results deepen our scientific understanding of immigrant acculturation, adaptation, and well-being, they have little if any immediate payoff to the participants in our studies. This challenge is, of course, not unique to studies of immigrant communities, but we have found that the inherent difficulties of communicating abstract principles of basic science are compounded by translation into a language like Vietnamese that sometimes lacks the precise words or phrases that would make the communication at least a little easier.⁵ A second layer of complexity in communicating such abstract ideas within an immigrant enclave is a common underlying suspicion of strangers who may be trying to exploit them by virtue of their immigrant status (Langford 2004).

We have taken two approaches to addressing these challenges. The first approach has been to invest resources into some more tangible benefits for the community. Examples include leveraging our positions at an elite institution to provide vocal advocacy for the need for a health clinic serving the community, financial sponsorship of tables or booths at community fairs and other events, and the hiring of undergraduate and graduate students from the community for paid research assistantships on our projects. We have sponsored a few written and media projects of little research significance but of high importance to the community and its leadership. One example is our sponsorship of a series of life history interviews of community elders that included a professional videographer teaching youth how to conduct and record such interviews. A second example is the production of a health needs assessment for the community and the city’s health department (Kaji 2015). A third example was a professional-quality documentation and formal recognition of influential Vietnamese American women in the community who work tirelessly “behind-the-scenes” to further the goals of the community (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Notable Women brochure.

The second approach has been to initiate a new research project that we knew would resonate more with the community and its leadership than was the case for our initial projects. This new study focuses on the health and well-being of older members of the Vietnamese community in New Orleans. We call it QUY for Quest for Understanding the Young-at-Heart.⁶ From our research team members’ point of view, we have long been keenly interested in the generation of Vietnamese who were in their prime working years when South Vietnam collapsed during the first half of the 1970s. From our community members’ point of view, elders are highly revered in Vietnamese society (Jamison 1993), and learning as much as possible from this exceptionally accomplished and revered generation is a high priority.

Emic versus etic—says who?

A major function of sophisticated research is to probe seemingly obvious events, outcomes, and interpretations in ways that lead to a deeper understanding of the historical, economic, and social forces that lead to and sustain such outcomes. Several of our longstanding areas of interest—such as the process of acculturation and adaptation to American ways of life—are potentially fraught to some members of our community of interest. This inherent problem cannot always be avoided, but we have tried to mitigate it by being frank about our keen interest and admiration of the community and its leaders. We also strive to use community members’ own words to describe their community and its story.

Oops!—containing and repairing damage

Not all of our efforts to develop and employ culturally appropriate art work have gone well. A year or two into the Katrina-related project, we decided to produce a professional-quality brochure in both Vietnamese and English to advertise our study and disseminate some early findings to the community. One of us owned an original painting that depicted citizens working together to fortify a levee around a Vietnamese city, and the artwork included the caption “đắp đê phòng lụt !⁷ It seemed perfect for our post-Katrina study because it was levee failures that led to most of the Katrina-related flooding of New Orleans in 2005, including the flooding of the principal Vietnamese enclave. We vetted the material with numerous Vietnamese and Vietnamese American colleagues, students, and friends and everyone agreed that it seemed perfect, and so we sent the brochure to press. The day of reckoning came when one of us sent an advance copy to one of our principal collaborators within the community and he shared it with several of the village elders. They noted to our community partner that the color red, albeit long symbolic of good luck among all Vietnamese (north and south), had been appropriated by the communists in the north for their own ends. The pith helmets worn by some of the men in the painting are now seen all over Vietnam, but back in the day of the village elders who were now reviewing the brochure, the helmets were characteristic of soldiers serving in the North Vietnamese Army.

Oops, indeed.

The elders were initially angry, but with heartfelt apologies and promises to do better in the future, they—and our community partner—eventually forgave the error. A principal precaution that we failed to make was to vet the source material earlier on with some older members of the community. A former soldier from the older generation would likely have been more attuned to such nuances of shading and headwear than were the numerous Vietnamese previewers whom we did ask.

Chagrined but relieved, it was at this point that we decided that we had enough work underway in the community to warrant hiring a fulltime project manager, who we eventually came to think of as our “cultural broker.” Our leading prospect was working with one of the principal CBOs serving the community. She was comfortable speaking, reading, and writing in both Vietnamese and English, and had had extensive experience in her role with the CBO interfacing with outside organizations (including universities). She also happens to possess a keen curiosity about a wide range of academic topics and has a graduate degree, helping to facilitate her understanding and comfort with academics and their goals.

One of her first assignments on our team was to brainstorm with key community leaders about alternative imagery and colors for a redo of the project brochure. The result of the revision is illustrated as Figure 4. The lotus is featured prominently as it represents beauty and purity. The bamboo is included because it represents the strength and resiliency of the Vietnamese people. After a protracted vetting process, we became confident that neither image—nor the new colors—carried any political undertones. Going through this “redo” exercise with members of the community illustrated our research team’s willingness to admit a bad mistake and demonstrated that we were serious about trying to rectify it. It also provided an opportunity for members of our community of interest to determine how their community is portrayed symbolically.

Figure 4.

Revised brochure.

Lessons Learned: Conclusions and Recommendations

Cultural brokering is neither easy nor straightforward. Genuine differences in the goals, perspectives, and expertise of academics and community leaders can make finding a middle ground difficult. Researchers are highly trained to plan, implement, and interpret research. Community leaders are highly skilled in discerning, articulating, and pursuing the most compelling needs of their community. But there are ample opportunities for mutual benefit that intersect with these two sets of professional objectives. For example, many community leaders have keen interests in science. Many academics have a genuine interest in improving the quality of life for members of local communities. Other opportunities lie with research topics that serve to move forward the interests of both sets of players and packages of activities that include both research and community development activities.

Cultural brokering can help to establish, strengthen, and maintain productive relations between academic research teams and the leadership of the communities that they work in. “Cultural brokering” involves a set of specialized knowledge and skills that could be spread across several members of a research or community-based team, but in many cases, having a dedicated “cultural broker” who focuses on the development of these specialized areas of knowledge and skills will be the most effective and efficient way to build and maintain productive working relations between community and academic groups. In this article, we have presented a case study in which a cultural broker was recruited to join as a member of the university-based research team, but we can imagine how a similar staff position could also benefit a CBO that regularly collaborates with research teams. Key skills include highly developed abilities to listen, empathize, clearly articulate complex (and conflicting) points of view, maintain calm during stressful situations, and facilitate give-and-take and compromise between the two groups. Key areas of knowledge that a successful cultural broker will need to have or develop include a solid understanding of the central explicit and implicit beliefs, values, and principles of the two entities of interest (here the academic community and the Vietnamese immigrant community); a solid understanding of the objectives and goals of the two groups; a solid—and almost instinctual—understanding of the areas of sensitivity (hot buttons) for each of the two groups; and the specialized language and terms (professional jargon) of each of the two entities.

Having such a dedicated cultural broker as a staff trainer can benefit the entire team as other members seek to improve the cultural competence—and cultural humility—that they will need as they step outside of their comfort zones and attempt to collaborate with individuals who are pursuing goals that are sometimes distinct from their own and who hold very different worldviews from their own. Cultural competence can be improved through language lessons; structured discussions of books, films, or short articles that focus on the culture of interest; and regular consultations to discuss specific problems related to cross-cultural communication. In Figure 5, we summarize the above discussion with a set of cultural brokers’ key traits, qualifications, potential roles, and contributions. We also include a set of training and operation strategies.

Figure 5.

Guideline for recruitment and operation of cultural brokers (adapted from Benoit et al. 2011:27; Jezewski and Sotnik 2001; VanLandingham 2015).

Limitations of—and Cautions About—the Cultural Brokering Approach

We conclude with a set of cautions and limitations of the cultural brokering approach. Cultural brokering as a process and an approach is not a panacea. How well it works—or doesn’t—will depend upon the skills and experience of the cultural broker and the level of dedication of members across the two teams to the process. Also, genuine differences in goals between the two teams require genuine give and take on both sides. A Cultural Broker can facilitate this process, but having someone in this role does not guarantee success.

A Cultural Broker is typically a paid employee of one of the two teams in the consortium, and this fact of life probably makes it impossible for the person filling this role to be a completely objective mediator between the two parties. Similarly, age, gender, and other social hierarchies can complicate the cultural broker’s interactions with community leaders, many of whom are older men with high social status. However, none of these challenges preclude the cultural broker’s most important role, which is to maintain a flow of curated information between the two teams so that both sides have ample opportunity to understand each other, to see opportunities for mutual benefit, and to realize their common and specific goals.

Cultural brokering can facilitate cultural competence within a research team, but the importance of also nurturing cultural humility among academics cannot be overemphasized. One area of concern is a widespread assumption that “translational research” moves knowledge in one direction, from the academy to the community, rather than being a two-way street. A second concern is another widespread assumption that the recruitment of scholars from underrepresented communities, while extremely important, is all that is needed to address cultural miscommunication. Scientific advance in understanding health disparities requires both the recruitment and training of young members of under-represented minority groups into science and also the perspectives of outsiders looking in so that unspoken shared assumptions do not cloud or mask important empirical results. Having some cursory—or even extensive—experience with a culture different from our own can lead both “insider” and “outsider” researchers to let our guard down and become overconfident in our initial reactions to a complex situation, especially if the situation resonates with a personal experience or serves to bolster our self-confidence in our initial “gut” reactions. After-the-fact examinations of situations that were known to have gone awry are not very helpful; these almost always conclude with a pat “well, that was just common sense.” Effective teaching of cultural humility requires that those undergoing such training be presented with complex and ambiguous situations at the outset of the exercise and be asked to navigate through them so that they do not retreat to after-the-fact platitudes and depart the exercise even more culturally arrogant than they were at the outset.

Many of us who work in cultural settings that are very different from those in which we grew up are keenly aware of perils related to our shortcomings in language fluency and the mastery of historical and social facts; one might consider these the “known unknowns” of engaging in cross-cultural research. But there are other opportunities for miscommunication and error that involve more nuanced and subtle cultural clues that are more difficult to anticipate. It is these “unknown unknowns” (Luft and Ingham 1955) that can make an experienced cultural broker an invaluable asset to a research team. Finally, cultural humility must be a quality that the cultural broker seeks to embody as well. With a culture such as the Vietnamese that is so enduring, dynamic, complex, and variable across countries, regions, and class, a skilled cultural broker can scarcely let her guard down, either. After all, culture is complex.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Instrumental, emotional, and logistic support for the work discussed in this paper is acknowledged with gratitude to our Vietnamese American friends in New Orleans, including our respondents in our studies and our community partners, especially the leadership of VIET, Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church, Mary Queen of Vietnam Community Development Corporation (MQVN CDC), the Vietnamese American Community, and the NOELA clinic. Comments received during a presentation on related topics to the Advisory Board of National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in January 2019 helped inspire the writing of this manuscript, as did subsequent conversations with Sara Curran, Kathleen Carlin and Rebecca Clark. Very helpful comments on a draft version of the paper from the following are acknowledged with gratitude: Father Vien Nguyen, Lauren Nguyen, and Carl Bankston.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Our research is funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child and Human Development, National Institutes of Health (R03HD042003 VanLandingham PI; R21HD057609 VanLandingham PI; and P01HD082032 VanLandingham Contact PI).

ORCID iD

NhuNgoc K. Pham

Bonnie Bui

Notes

Author Biographies

Mark J. VanLandingham, PhD, is the Thomas C. Keller Professor at Tulane University. Professor VanLandingham directs Tulane’s Center for Studies of Displaced Populations (CSDP) and leads research teams focusing on rural-to-urban migration within Southeast Asia; long-term post-disaster recovery; and acculturation, health, and well-being among Vietnamese immigrants living in New Orleans.

Trang Nguyen, PhD, MSW, is a faculty member of Vietnam National University, Hanoi. She recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Center for Studies of Displaced Populations at Tulane University. Her research interests include mental health, resilience, and coping among older adults and their family caregivers.

Cam-Thanh Tran is a founding member of Mary Queen of Vietnam (MQVN) Community Development Corporation and the Intercultural Charter School in New Orleans East. Ms. Tran is currently the assistant director of Tulane’s Center for Studies of Displaced Populations.

NhuNgoc K. Pham received her PhD in Public Health from Tulane University. At Tulane, she served as research assistant to several projects affiliated with the Center for Studies of Displaced Populations. Her research areas include population dynamics, mental health, and health impacts from natural and manmade disasters.

Bonnie Bui earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine and was a postdoctoral fellow at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, where she currently serves as an adjunct assistant professor. Dr. Bui has worked on studies related to social support, resilience, and aging.

Philip Anglewicz, PhD, is the William G. Robertson, Jr. Professor in Population and Family Planning at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Anglewicz’s research focused on the impact of and recovery from shocks of various forms, such as natural disasters and infectious diseases.

References

Ayto

2005. Word Origins. London, England: A&C Black.

Beldo

2010. “Concept of Culture.” Pp. 144–52 in 21st Century Anthropology, Vol. 1, edited by Birx

H. J.

Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Benoit

Casey

Jansson

Phillips

Burns

2011. “Developing Knowledge Transfer with Non-Profit Organizations Serving Vulnerable Populations.” Pp. 15–34 in Knowledge Translation in Context, edited by Banister

E. M.

Leadbeater

B. J.

Marshall

E. A.

Toronto, Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto Press.

Bernal

Bonilla

Bellido

1995. “Ecological Validity and Cultural Sensitivity for Outcome Research: Issues for the Cultural Adaptation and Development of Psychosocial Treatments with Hispanics.” Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 23(1):67–82. doi:10.1007/BF01447045.

Brar-Josan

Yohani

S. C.

2019. “Cultural Brokers’ Role in Facilitating Informal and Formal Mental Health Supports for Refugee Youth in School and Community Context: A Canadian Case Study.” British Journal of Guidance & Counselling 47(4):512–23. doi:10.1080/03069885.2017.1403010.

Calhoun

2002. “Culture.” In Dictionary of the Social Sciences, edited by Calhoun

Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Hutchinson

Mai

VanLandingham

2009. “Disparities in Health Care among Vietnamese New Orleanians and the Impacts of Hurricane Katrina.” Research in the Sociology of Health Care 27:301–19.

Fadiman

1997. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

VanLandingham

2010. “Mental and Physical Health Consequences of Repatriation for Vietnamese Returnees.” Journal of Refugee Studies 23(2):60–182.

10.

VanLandingham

2012a. “Disentangling the Effects of Migration, Selection and Acculturation on Weight and Body Fat Distribution: Results from a Natural Experiment Involving Vietnamese Americans, Returnees, and Never-Leavers.” Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health 14(5):786–96.

11.

VanLandingham

2012b. “Mental Health Consequences of International Migration for Vietnamese Americans and the Mediating Effect of Social Networks: Results from a Natural Experiment Approach.” Demography 49(2):393–424.

12.

Geertz

1972. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” Daedalus 10(1):1–37.

13.

Jamison

N. L.

1993. Understanding Vietnam. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

14.

Jezewski

M. A.

Sotnik

2001. Culture Brokering: Providing Culturally Competent Rehabilitation Services to Foreign–Born Persons. New York: Center for International Rehabilitation Research Information & Exchange.

15.

Kaji

2015. Health Needs Assessment for Vietnamese Americans in New Orleans. New Orleans, LA: Tulane University.

16.

Langford

A. E.

2004. “What’s in a Name: Notarios in the United States and the Exploitation of a Vulnerable Latino Immigrant Population.” Harvard Latin American Law Review 7:115–36.

17.

Lefley

H. P.

Bestman

E. W.

1991. “Public-Academic Linkages for Culturally Sensitive Community Mental Health.” Community Mental Health Journal 27(6):473–88. doi:10.1007/BF00752669.

18.

Lomas

2007. “The In-Between World of Knowledge Brokering.” BMJ 334(7585):129–32. doi:10.1136/bmj.39038.593380.AE.

19.

Luft

Ingham

1955. “The Johari Window, a Graphic Model of Interpersonal Awareness.” Proceedings of the Western Training Laboratory in Group Development. University of California.

20.

Meyer

2010. “The Rise of the Knowledge Broker.” Science Communication 32(1):118–27. doi:10.1177/1075547009359797.

21.

Morris

C. G.

1996. Academic Press Dictionary of Science and Technology. 4th ed. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier Science & Technology.

22.

Pinsoneault

L. T.

Connors

E. R.

Jacobs

E. A.

Broeckling

2019. “Go Slow to Go Fast: Successful Engagement Strategies for Patient-Centered, Multi-Site Research, Involving Academic and Community-Based Organizations.” Journal of General Internal Medicine 34(1):125–31. doi:10.1007/s11606-018-4701-6.

23.

Small

M. L.

Harding

D. J.

Lamont

2010. “Introduction: Reconsidering Culture and Poverty.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 629:6–27. doi:10.2307/40607606.

24.

VanLandingham

M. J.

2015. “Promoting Teamwork, from within and from Afar.” Pp. 327–35 in The SAGE Handbook of Research Management, edited by Dingwall

Robert

McDonnell

Mary Byrne

. London, England: Sage.

25.

VanLandingham

M. J.

2017. Weathering Katrina: Culture and Recovery among Vietnamese-Americans. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

26.

VanLandingham

2012. “Physical and Mental Health Consequences of Katrina on Vietnamese Immigrants in New Orleans: A Pre and Post-Disaster Assessment.” Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health 14(3):386–94.

27.

VanLandingham

Bankston

2009. “Evacuation and Return of Vietnamese New Orleanians Affected by Hurricane Katrina.” Organization and Environment 22:422–36.

28.

Zhang

Pendley

S. C.

2017. Shifting Methods When Disaster Strikes: The Conversion of a Cross-National Comparative Approach to a Longitudinal Cohort Study of Vietnamese Americans. London, England: Sage.