Articles |
Theoretical and Methodological Challenges of Studying Refugee Children in the Middle East and North Africa: Young Palestinian, Afghan and Sahrawi Refugees
1 Refugee Studies Programme, University of Oxford, UK Dawn.Chatty{at}qeh.ox.ac.uk
2 School of Health and Social Studies, University of Warwick, UK
This article aims to address a number of conceptual and methodological challenges facing the study of young refugees. Much of the research on refugees has, until recently, been focused on adults, and to a lesser degree, on young children. Those studies that do include children are largely carried out in the domain of psychology and psychiatry and tend to pathologize and individualize. This article is based on observations derived from a six-year, multi-disciplinary anthropological and participatory research programme that examined the impact of forced migration on young people in the Middle East and North Africa: Palestinian refugee youth in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza, Sahrawi youth in Algeria, and Afghan youth in Iran. It argues that despite the challenges, an anthropological and participatory approach contributes to a greater, more holistic understanding of refugee youth.
MS received Feburary 2005; revised MS received June 2005
1. This research programme has been generously funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. The results from the first study have been published in Chatty and Lewando Hundt (2005). A Lessons Learned Report (2001) is also available, and may be obtained online at www.forcedmigration.org. In the second study, the Sahrawi fieldwork was led by Randa Farah and encompassed all four of the refugee camps in the Tindouf region. The Afghan fieldwork was led by Homa Hoodfar and centres on the Afghan refugee populations in Tehran and Mashhad.
2. One of the key debates in anthropology today concerns its place as a ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ science and the kind of generalizations that it can generate. In this debate, some argue that generalization screens out individual differences and idiosyncrasies, leaving only those characteristics that the members of some collectivity appear to have in common. This then is what enables anthropology to attribute beliefs and practices not to particular persons, but to entire groups. Others in the profession argue against such notions of generalization, perhaps from a deep-seated unease about the way we tend to speak of ‘societies’ and ‘cultures’ as collectivities whose members have more in common with one another than with members of other, equivalent groupings (Ingold 1996:18–20). In this paper the position is taken that generalization is at the core of the anthropological knowledge project and that social science is the study of meaningful human behaviour. This study is concerned to maintain the anthropological project of cross-cultural or cross-societal comparison.
3. The initial project document used the term ‘adolescent’ to describe the older children who were the subject of the study. In the course of field work, however, the research teams found it increasingly uncomfortable to use a ‘medical term’ to describe what was increasingly being recognized as a social category. Hence the terms ‘youth’ and ‘young person’ were chosen and used interchangeably to describe the social group that we were studying.
4. The Smara, Auserd, and Aaiun camps are located in close proximity to one another and each claims around 40,000–45,000 residents. The fourth camp, Dakhla, is located at some distance from the other camps and claims a higher population of between 45,000 and 50,000 residents. Each camp is intended to function as a self-contained ‘wilaya’ or province of SADR. Each ‘wilaya’ is divided into six ‘daira’ or districts, with Dakhla claiming seven due its slightly higher population. Each ‘daira’ is subdivided into four ‘hay’ or sub-districts.
5. Natural group interviewing, unlike focus group interviewing where individuals with special attributes are brought together, is composed of people naturally found in a particular setting.
6. While promoting participatory methods, Boyden (2001) and Hart (2002) have also written about the limitations and challenges of children's participation in the context of forced migration. Kapoor (2002) explores the theoretical limitations of Chambers' work on participatory development.
7. The team leader was required to submit a translation of the research proposal in Arabic to the SADR, where it was discussed by the relevant government ministers. After some discussion, where it emerged that the SADR was particularly interested in gaining a greater understanding of contemporary Sahrawi young peoples' attitudes and opinions, approval to conduct the study was granted, and the team leader was granted special access to the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Youth.
8. A web-search of the ISI Web of Knowledge citation index database provides a sense of the trends in research on refugee children and youth. The database was accessed using the following web address: http://portalt.wok.mimas.ac.uk/portal.cgi. A search for articles on the combined topic of ‘refugee’ and ‘children’ on 10 June 2005 resulted in 437 documents published between 1970 and 2005.
9. A combined keyword search of the ISI Web of Knowledge on the topic ‘children’ and ‘refugee’ and ‘trauma’ is evidence of the relatively recent, yet steadily popular, integration of the trauma concept in refugee studies. The database was accessed on 14 June 2005 with the following results: of the 73 articles that appear, one was published during the decade of the 1980s, followed by a remarkable increase during the 1990s to 36 articles. Between 2000 and 2005 alone, an additional 36 were published.
10. There have been some efforts to develop culturally-contextualized trauma approaches. Nader et al. (1999) edited a volume on the role of culture in psychosocial work. Mollica et al. (1992) revised the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire (HTQ) for Indochinese populations, to be used among Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees. The Japanese version was written for survivors of the 1995 Kobe earthquake. The Croatian Veterans' version was written for soldiers who survived the wars in the Balkans, while the Bosnian one was written for civilian survivors of that conflict. See the review of these and other works in Loughry and Eyber (2003).
11. The PWG comprises four universities (Queen Margaret's University College, Edinburgh, Centre for International Health Studies; Oxford's Refugee Studies Centre; Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health; and Harvard's Program in Refugee Trauma) as well as four humanitarian agencies (International Rescue Committee; Save the Children, USA; Christian Children's Fund; and Médecins Sans Frontières, Holland).
12. Broader, community-wide perspectives, rather than those of the individual, are also important in intervention programmes. An anthropological approach places less emphasis on individual recovery or on ‘talking through’ one's problems characteristic of Western treatment (Korbin 2003; Perren-Klingler 1996). It has been argued that ‘the use of "talk therapy" aimed at altering individual behaviour through the individual's "insight" into his or her own personality is firmly rooted in a conception of the person as a distinct and independent individual, capable of self-transformation in relative isolation from particular social contexts’ (White and Marsella 1982: 23). This point was illustrated through a study conducted by Eyber and Ager (2002) among displaced people of Angola that documented the widespread belief throughout the community that to dwell on the past was destructive to the healing process. Effective interventions should therefore reflect and respect community perspectives, draw on local resources and already existing coping mechanisms.
13. Two representatives of Spanish NGOs with combined experience of working in the Sahrawi camps for more than a decade indicated that qualitative and participatory work with Sahrawi children is still rare. Only one or two NGOs have begun to undertake the kind of work which has become so common in places, for example, like Lebanon, where Save the Children has been conducting participatory activities since the mid-1990s (personal communications, Sahrawi and Afghan dissemination workshop, Platres, Cyprus, May 2005).
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
This article has been cited by other articles:
|
|
 |
|
  G. Dona The Microphysics of Participation in Refugee Research Journal of Refugee Studies, June 1, 2007; 20(2): 210 - 229. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
|
|
D. Chatty Researching Refugee Youth in the Middle East: Reflections on the Importance of Comparative Research Journal of Refugee Studies, June 1, 2007; 20(2): 265 - 280. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|