Dr. Sarah Alkhaifi (Assistant professor at King Abdulaziz University)
Dr. Sarah Alkhaifi is an assistant professor at King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia, and a certified women’s heath nurse practitioner. She holds a PhD degree in nursing from the University of California Los Angeles, a master’s degree in women’s health from Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, and a bachelor’s degree in nursing from King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia. She holds a diploma in academic English writing from UCLA.
Dr. Alkhaifi’s fifteen years as a nurse and nurse practitioner in women’s health, in both Saudi Arabia and the United States, has strongly influenced her research interests. She has found that many complicated morbidities among women could be detected early and managed through adherence to secondary screenings. Her research focuses on exploring the factors that affect Muslim and/or Arab women’s behavior toward cancer screenings and then designing culturally tailored interventions to encourage them.
Her mixed-method research has aimed to first investigate how Muslim Arab women’s health beliefs, knowledge about breast cancer and mammograms, fatalism, modesty, and husbands’ opinions influence their mammogram utilization. Second, it aimed to understand Muslim Arab women’s experiences and their perceptions of their husbands’ influence regarding mammograms within their sociocultural context, both before and after immigration to the United States.
