Technical Report - Donegal Traveller's Project

Health Survey FindingsTable 259: Agreement with the statement ‘Generally speaking, most people can be trusted’Strongly agreeor agreeTravellers (ROI) Travellers (NI) SLAN 2002medical cardholdersMale(n=694)Female(n=945)Male(n=191)Female(n=201)Male(n=620)Female(n=902)SLAN 2002All participantsMale(n=2,355)Female(n=3,395)23.5% 24.7% 24.1% 29.9% 70.0% 67.7% 67.3% 67.1%Strongly disagree 28.0% 24.2% 6.8% 8.5% 2.4% 2.6% 2.8% 2.3%Rating of social supports in the AITHS and SLAN 2002 respondents is shown in Table 260. Thepercentages shown represent the valid percentage of all those who had access to that kind of support,i.e. if a respondent indicated that they did not have children, or that a supportive relationship with theclergy was not applicable to them, they were removed for the purposes of calculating the percentage.The Travellers can be seen to rate the support they receive from their parents more highly than do thegeneral SLAN 2002 population.Table 260: Number who agreed that the following groups of friends and family gave them ‘alot of support’, in the AITHS and SLAN 2002 studiesSource of supportTravellers(ROI) (n=1,559)Travellers(NI) (n=367)SLAN 2002 medicalcard holders(n=1,639)SLAN 2002 generalpopulation(n=5,974)Spouse/Partner 71.6% 69.2% 78.3% 81.6%Parent(s) 69.6% 59.3% 55.4% 38.3%Child(ren) 65.9% 55.0% 61.7% 52.9%Other close relatives 40.7% 34.2% 39.0% 30.2%Friends 36.0% 31.5% 37.2% 34.0%Clergy 40.9% 20.2% - -Furthermore, in comparison with a low income mixed race group aged between 25 and 64 fromthe US (Krieger et al., 2005), where similar questions were asked, the Traveller experiences of ethnicdiscrimination seem much more common (Table 261) 5 .5We include this comparison because the data items capturing experience of discrimination used in AITHSwere derived from the instrument used by Krieger et al. (2005) and therefore the measurements can be seen asdirectly comparable, although there is a proviso that unlike the other comparisons in this document, in this casethe comparator group is clearly not from the general Irish population.219