The Center for New North Carolinians

CAMPUS LINKS

Back to CNNC Research Fellows

Sharon Morrison,
Ph.D. in Health Education & Behavior, University of Florida
Assistant Professor, Department of Public Health,
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Tel: 336.334.3243
Email: sdmorri2@uncg.edu

Biographical Information

Dr. Sharon Morrison is originally from the sunny Caribbean island of Jamaica, a country that has a large proportion of its population living abroad as immigrants. Her interest in cross-cultural communities and international health led her to a cultural immersion experience in Mexico where she studied Spanish language, the anthropology and health of the Yucatan Peninsula, and health issues in Chiapas State. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Health Education & Behavior at the University of Florida and also holds a Graduate Certificate in Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2001 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health Education.

Morrison has continued her work on international/cross-cultural health issues, including a focus on the health and social welfare of immigrants and refugees. Her first project, the Health Literacy for Life project, provided health education to immigrant women enrolled in ESL classes at the Glenwood Library in Greensboro. She was also a co-investigator on an interdisciplinary project, Cultural Adaptation Resources Planning (CARP), which produced an "eco-map" of available and needed community resources to assist recent and newly arrived immigrants and refugees with food, nutrition and health issues. The project is described in the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health. She has designed and taught a course, Immigrant and Refugee Health, in which both she and her students are actively engaged in providing technical expertise to organizations serving new immigrants and refugees in the Guilford County area.

CNNC Research Fellow/
AmeriCorps ACCESS Project, Professional Corps Member, 2006-07
Sharon Morrison was a CNNC Research Fellow and AmeriCorps ACCESS Project Professional Corps Member during the 2006-07 year. During the course of her participation in the initiatives, she collaborated with Drs. Raleigh Bailey, Paige Smith, and Cinthya Saavedra, on a project to investigate values, beliefs and childcare preferences of African, Mexican, and Montagnard immigrant families in Guilford County, North Carolina. The project was funded by the Guilford County Partnership for Children (GCPC) and designed to engage each immigrant community in assessing its cultural strengths, problems and solutions related to raising their children's, and identifying factors impacting access to early care. The project involved the formation of a Community Advisory Team (CAT) that consisted of members of ethnic immigrant community organizations, lay community advisors and the research team. Under advisement from the CAT, 2 to 3 focus groups were conducted in each respective ethnic community. Focus groups consisted primarily of immigrant women raising children aged 0 to 5 years old and were conducted with the goal of exploring perceptions on raising young children both in participants' countries of origin and in the United States. The findings revealed a need for dissemination of information about available local childcare services to immigrant communities, social support for immigrant parents raising children at home, and the tailoring of existing services to incorporate traditional childcare strategies from each ethnic immigrant group. These results have contributed to the development of a proposal to develop immigrant parent education groups (PEG) that will serve as vehicles for addressing identified needs.

Morrison also collaborated with Omer Omer (CNNC Research Fellow and Director of the African Services Coalition) to develop a culturally based program to address health and social empowerment issues among African immigrant and refugee women.

Back to CNNC Research Fellows

Biographical Information

Links