Exploring Priority Issues among a Sample of Adults from Minority Ethnic Communities Who Are Living with Visual Impairment in the UK

Abstract

Background: Despite an increased risk of visual impairment (V.I.) among adults from minority ethnic communities in the UK, limited research has explored their wider life experiences. Methods: A secondary analysis of V.I. Lives survey data explored priority issues among a sample of 46 Asian, 22 Black, and 77 White adults who have visual impairment A list of 24 issues were grouped into 10 life domains. Issue and domain mean importance scores were calculated for each to facilitate ranking of importance. Results: Kruskal–Wallis tests showed that there were statistically significant differences between the three groups for 7/10 domains and 19/24 issues. Post hoc comparisons showed that this largely reflected group differences between Asian and White participants. While there were no statistically significant differences between Asian and Black participants possibly due to small sample sizes, there were statistically significant differences between Asian and White participants in 7/10 domains and 14/24 issues. Additionally, there were significant differences between Black and White participants in 5/10 domains and 7/24 issues, specialist workplace equipment being the only issue with a significant difference between White and Black but not Asian participants. There were no group differences for confidence in ability to do everyday tasks and opportunities to take part in more sporting and leisure activities. Overall, White participants generally rated all issues as less important than Asian and Black participants. The top-three domains for Asian participants were ‘accessible environments’/‘finances’, ‘technology’, and ‘public attitudes’. The top-three issues were accessibility of public transport, employer attitudes, and reduction of street clutter. The top-three domains among Black participants were ‘employment’, ‘accessible environments’, and ‘emotional support’. The top-three issues were employer attitudes/specialised education for young people with V.I., specialist V.I. equipment in the workplace, and confidence in ability to do everyday tasks/accessibility of public transport. Conclusions: Differences in priorities between the groups suggest that the needs of individual communities may be lost when grouping culturally diverse communities together, highlighting the need for more research with different minority ethnic communities.

Keywords

• visual impairment
• sight loss
• minority ethnic
• BAME
• social inequalities
• health inequalities