Citation

Muir JA, Cope MR, Angeningsih LR, Jackson JE, Brown RB. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2019; 16(15): e16152726.

Affiliation

Department of Sociology, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/ijerph16152726

PMID

31370162

Abstract

Migration is a standard survival strategy in the context of disasters. While prior studies have examined factors associated with return migration following disasters, an area that remains relatively underexplored is whether moving home to one's original community results in improved health and well-being compared to other options such as deciding to move on. In the present study, our objective is to explore whether return migration, compared to other migration options, results in superior improvements to mental health. We draw upon data from a cross-sectional pilot study conducted 16 months after a series of volcanic eruptions in Merapi, Indonesia. Using ordinal logistic regression, we find that compared to respondents who were still displaced (reference category), respondents who had "moved home" were proportionally more likely to report good mental health (proportional odds ratios (POR) = 2.02 [95% CI = 1.05, 3.91]) compared to average or poor mental health. Likewise, respondents who had "moved on" were proportionally more likely to report good mental health (POR = 2.64 [95% CI = 0.96, 7.77]. The results suggest that while moving home was an improvement from being displaced, it may have been better to move on, as this yielded superior associations with self-reported mental health.

Language: en

Keywords

environmental disasters; forced migration; health; internal displacement