Poster #135 - Dimensional prepositions as locators of spatial-relational thought processes among survivors of Sarajevo siege

• In Event: 2-002 - Special Poster Session 05 with Continental Breakfast Reception
  In Poster Session: PS 05 - International Section

Integrative Statement

Research with children and youth in situations of violence and armed conflict tends to focus on damage to an individual child's emotional health or a delay in normative developmental processes. This almost exclusive focus on psychopathology as a response to war defines individuals' reactions to these events as automatic psychological responses. Indeed, a number of systematic reviews show that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), trauma, anxiety, and depression affect 10% to 50% of children exposed to war (Fazel, Wheeler & Danesh, 2005; Attanayake et al., 2009). However, we know very little about the broader range of developmental outcomes among 50% to 90% children and youth who grow up during situations of violence and destruction but do not experience the emotional consequences associated with trauma in the aftermath of war. In order to fill this knowledge gap, the present study employs narrative inquiry to understand the socio-cognitive development of young people who grew up during the siege of Sarajevo (1992 - 1995).
The study sought to understand the relationship between environmental and socio-cognitive aspects of young people's psychological development during the time of war. Data presented were collected using the dynamic story-telling method which employs narration to enact and study the socio-cognitive development of young people during times of social change and political violence. Specifically, the study explores how 16 individuals who grew up during the four-year long siege of Sarajevo, Bosnia ('92-95) employ language as a tool to make sense of their peacetime and war time experience in 2015 - twenty years following the conclusion of the Bosnian war. The mean age of participants as a group at the start of the siege in 1992 was 12, while in 1995, at the conclusion of the war, it was 15. During the study, participants wrote in response to narrative prompts that asked them to describe events from three historically distinct periods of their development: 1) the prewar; 2) the acute war; and 3) the postwar period. Analyses of the data explore how prepositions (specifically dimensional prepositions employed to indicate location, direction and time) reveal sociocognitive processes enacted in narrative construction by pointing to a narrator's representation, use, understanding, and developmental significance of place, direction, and time in narrative action. Significantly higher use of prepositions in narrative responses about the acute war period, in comparison to the pre or the post war period, is theorized to indicate that growing up amidst war and urban destruction gives rise to socio-cognitive processes that are especially well attuned to spatial-relational and temporal information processing.

Author

• Luka Lucic, Pratt Insitute
  Presenting Author