Psychosocial intervention programs for stress management in adult migrants from Latin America: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract

Introduction: Latin American migrants experience vulnerability and continuous exposure to stress during their journey to United States, as a result, intervention programs with the objective to reduce psychological disorders in the migrant population have been developed. Method: A systematic review with meta-analysis was carried out following Co-chrane and Prisma guidelines, determining the following components: population of interest, characteristics of the interventions, comparison criteria, results and intervention designs to analyze the efficacy of psychosocial intervention in stress for migrant adults of Latin American origin in the United States. Results: 296 articles were identified through databases; EBSCO host, Science Direct, PubMed, Elsevier and the Cochrane metasearch, seven of them were included in the systematic review and six in the meta-analysis. The results of the meta-analysis indicate that stress intervention programs for adult migrants of Latin American origin in the United States had a low effect size of .17, with a variability of 98.51% and significant hetero-geneity. Conclusions: Discrepancies were detected between the effect size reported in the primary studies and that assessed by the metafor package of the Rstudio statistical program, in addition serious limitations were found in the designs and methods used in the primary studies, which restricts the scope of the results found in the present study.