Program of Research
Mental health challenges disproportionately impact racial/ethnic minorities and immigrant communities due to a complex interplay of social determinants operating at multiple levels—from individual experiences of discrimination to community-level stressors and structural barriers to care. Despite the fact that this has been a long-standing question in social work and behavioral health research, mental health services often fail to reach or effectively serve minority and immigrant populations.
To tackle these entrenched disparities, my work centers on the following perspectives:
- A macro-level perspective to interrogate how social policies and care delivery models can perpetuate or ameliorate inequities
- A mezzo-level perspective to map local risk and protective factors shaping mental health
- A technological perspective to investigate the equity impacts of telehealth, mobile apps, social media, and other digital innovations
- An intersectionality perspective to investigate how various social identities intersect and create unique experiences of oppression that impact mental health
Across projects, I harness quantitative, geospatial, and computational social science methods—especially natural language processing—to capture these multi-level determinants of minority mental health and wellbeing. The ultimate goal is to inform the development and implementation of more targeted, responsive, and scalable interventions to eliminate disparities and ensure all individuals and communities can thrive.
Furthermore, I am interested in how data science / computational methods can improve social work research without causing harm. This includes exploring the application and implications of data science in the field and education. How can large volumes of text data, such as clinical or case notes, social media, or administrative data, along with large language models, be applied to enhance social work research and practice? This line of inquiry emphasizes the potential for technology to contribute to, rather than detract from, the ethical advancement of social work.
Dissertation Project
My dissertation project, Unraveling Ethnic Disparities: Spatial and Virtual Access to Mental Health Services among Immigrants with Language Barriers, focuses on the linguistic and cultural barriers immigrants with LEP face in accessing mental health services and the role of technology in overcoming them. By identifying service gaps arising from structural racism, this study aims to drive structural reforms in the educational and training systems for multilingual and multicultural social workers to close the health gaps across ethnic minorities. The anticipated findings could pave the way for tailored mental health services for Hispanic and Asian immigrants with language barriers, striving towards a more inclusively equipped workforce.
There are three parts of my dissertation using the multi-method approach to assess linguistic accessibility in the real world at the 1) system, 2) provider, and 3) client level.
- The first study will use computational science to determine the availability of mental health treatment in Spanish and Asian languages and examine the influence of structural xenophobia on mental health care accessibility.
- The second study will test emails sent to a large sample of multilingual mental health providers across the U.S. from mock clients with a) foreign- or American-sounding names and b) in English or other languages to determine if linguistic barriers and provider bias impact a client’s access to mental health services.
- The final study will involve qualitative interviews with Asian immigrants with LEP who have sought telemental health services in their primary language to explore their decision-making processes and experiences.
Throughout the dissertation project, I employ the public health critical race praxis (PHCRP) with a focus on 1) contemporary patterns of racial relations, 2) knowledge production, 3) conceptualization and measurement, 4) and action. In addition to the qualitative part of the study, I collaborate with the community advisory board for voice representation and use dissemination strategies such as data visualization and mapping.
Funded Grant/Award for Dissertation Research
- APA Dissertation Research Award ($5,000), American Psychological Association
- Grand Challenges for Social Work Doctoral Award ($3,000), Grand Challenges for Social Work (Funding: New York Community Trust)
- Diane Greenstein Memorial Fellowship ($5,000), NYU Silver School of Social Work
- C.V. Starr Fund for A/P/A Research ($1,000), Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU
- PhD Program Dissertation Research Fund ($1,000), NYU Silver School of Social Work
- Graduate Student Award for Summer Research on Migration ($1,500), NYU Migration Network
Publications
Below, you will find a selected list of publications and presentations based on research areas.
1) Understand the structural factors in the provision of culturally and linguistically appropriate services
How are structural-level factors associated with the provision of culturally and linguistically appropriate services for individuals from diverse backgrounds? How responsive is the social worker licensure/training system to diverse cultural and linguistic needs?
Publications
Yoo, N., Nicholson, H., Chang, D.F., & Okazaki, S., (2023) Mapping Anti-Asian Xenophobia: State-level Variation in Implicit and Explicit Bias against Asian Americans across the United States. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World. doi: 10.1177/23780231231196517
Working papers
Yoo, N., Park, M., & Chang, D.F. Structural Xenophobia and the Language Availability for Hispanic and Asian Pacific Islanders in Substance Use Treatment System.
Yoo, N., Park, M., Chang, D.F., Harnessing computational methods to assess racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity in the social worker workforce in the United States. Invited to special issue of Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research.
2) Advance understanding of mental health and well-being among Asian/Asian American communities
How do racial/ethnic identity and race-related stressors and responses influence the well-being and mental health of Asian Americans? How could the subgroup differentiate this influence among Asian Americans (e.g., ethnicity, sexual orientation, and immigrant generation)?
Publications
Chang, D.F., Yoo, N., Prasai, A., Lee, C.S., & Okazaki, S. (2023). From Racial Awakening to Collective Action: Asian Americans’ Pathways to Activism and Benevolent Support in Response to Anti-Asian Discrimination. Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology. doi: 10.1037/cdp0000617
Okazaki, S., Lee, C.S., Prasai, A., Chang, D.F., & Yoo, G. (2022). Disaggregating the Data: Diversity of COVID-19 stressors, discrimination, and mental health among Asian American communities. Frontiers in Public Health. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.956076
3) Harness data science and natural language processing methods in social work research
How can data science methods improve social work research without causing harm? How can large volumes of text data (e.g., clinical/case notes, social media, or administrative data) and large language models be applied to enhance social work research and practice?
Publications
Stanhope, V., Yoo, N., Matthews, L., Baslock, D., & Hu, Y. The impact of collaborative documentation on person-centered care: A textual analysis of clinical notes. JMIR Medical Informatics.
Yoo, N., Matthews, L., Stanhope, V., & Baslock, D. (2024). Impact of collaborative documentation on completeness and length of clinical notes in behavioral health settings. Psychiatric Services. doi: 10.1176/appi.ps.20230118
Gu, S. J., Park, J. M., Yoo, G., Song, T. M. (2019). Developing an Ontology for Personal Debt and Its Application to Social Big Data. Korean Journal of Social Welfare Research. doi: 10.17997/SWRY.63.1.1 [In Korean]
Presentations
Yoo, N., Ritchie, A., & Gwadz, M. (2024, Jan). Democratizing Data Science Methods for Social Work Students: Report on Organizing the Summer Institute of Computational Social Science. Oral presentation at Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR). Washington D.C.
Yoo, N. (2023, Jun). Leveraging LLMs for Computational Social Science Applications. Summer Institute of Computational Social Science (SICSS)-NYU Silver. New York, NY.
Chang, D.F., Yoo, G., Nguyen, T., & Okazaki, S. (2023, Jan). Using Twitter to capture Racism in the Air: Integrating Macro and Micro-level factors to Predict Asian American Well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. Oral presentation at the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR). Phoenix, AZ.
4) Understand technology-related factors in improving well-being among (im)migratns
How and when can technology assist in enhancing the well-being of immigrant communities? How is this related to the utilization of telehealth and telemental health services?
Publications
Yoo, N., & Jang, S.H. (2023). Increased digital technology use, technological self-efficacy, and life satisfaction among North Korean migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic: Moderated Moderation. Digital Health. 9, doi: 10.1177/20552076231171503
Working papers
Yoo, N., & Jang, S.H. Enhancing or compensating? The role of online social capital and technological self-efficacy on subjective well-being by nativity. Revised and Resubmitted to Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.
5) Understand factors related to health, mental health, and well-being among immigrants in South Korea
Publications
Yoo, N., & Jang, S.H. (2024). Remittance as reactive transnationalism: The role of perceived unfairness among immigrants in South Korea. Published in International Migration.
Yoo, N., & Jang, S.H., (2024). Does social empathy moderate fear-induced minority blaming during the COVID-19 pandemic? Social Science & Medicine. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.116719
Yoo, N., Hong, Y., & Choi, Y. (2023). Immigrant-origin youths at risk: Trends in suicidal behaviors among Korean adolescents by immigrant origins and ethnic options (2011–2019). Journal of Affective Disorders. doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2022.10.033
Kim, S.N., Yang, O.K., Yoo, G. & Yoon, J.H. (2019). Re-settlement Experiences among Re-entry North Korean Migrants. Journal of Future Social Work Research. doi: 10.22836/kaswpr.2019.10.1.39 [In Korean]
Working papers
Yoo, N., & Jang, S.H. Inherited risk: Tobacco smoking rates in parental countries of origin, secondhand smoke, and physical and mental health among Korean adolescents. Under Review in Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Use
