Narratives of Syrian Newcomer Children’s Emotional Experiences and Coping During Their Resettlement in Canada

• In Event: Hearing Both Sides: Understanding Refugee Newcomers’ Resettlement in Canada and South Korea

Abstract

Various situational factors experienced by refugee children before, during, and after migration have shown to contribute to the complexity of mental health and adjustment trajectories during their resettlement (Elsayed et al., 2019; Hadfield et al., 2017; Miller & Rasmussen, 2010). Although emotional processes may be at the core of these trajectories (Malti et al., 2016), not much is known about the specifics of newcomer children’s emotional experiences, including the causes of emotions and the ways in which children handle these emotions. Newcomer children’s construction of narratives may help us grasp their emotional processes and strategies to cope with negative emotions (e.g., sadness, anger) in daily lives (Fivush et al., 2003; Wainryb et al., 2018), which may inform designing interventions to promote their adjustment in the new society. Here we examine the following two research questions using a narrative approach: (1) What makes newcomer children sad or angry and (2) how do they cope with these negative emotions?

Participants were 78 Syrian newcomer children who had arrived in a large Canadian city within the past two years (5-13 year-olds; 55% girls). During a qualitative interview, we asked them in Arabic to tell us about a time when they felt anger and a time when they felt sadness. Situation description (the causes) and coping strategies (“what helped you feel less angry/sad”?) were consensus-coded by two bilingual research assistants with coding schemes that were developed through a directed content analysis based on emotion regulation (Gross & Thompson, 2007) and coping literature (Pfefferbaum et al., 2016). To examine the frequencies and relations among demographic factors, causes of emotions, and coping strategies, descriptive analyses and chi-square tests were conducted using SPSS.

The results showed that most children reported emotional situations that occurred after migration, and peer problems and sibling conflict were the most common situations causing both anger and sadness (Figure 1). Refugee-specific situations such as missing loved ones were rare but more often reported for sadness than for anger. In terms of the coping strategies used to regulate these emotions, we found that children overall used more intrinsic regulation (i.e., attempting to regulate on their own) than extrinsic regulation (i.e., receiving support from others to regulate). Among intrinsic regulation strategies, escape-oriented strategy was most common approach followed by problem solving and cognitive strategy (Table 1). There were no significant differences in the use of four coping strategies across anger and sadness, X2 (4) = 7.28, p = .11.

The current study sheds light on emotional situations that newcomer children experience during the migration and resettlement process. Notably, the most common causes of negative emotions were peer problems rather than pre-migratory factors. Also, newcomer children used various intrinsic strategies to cope with their anger and sadness. These findings imply intervention efforts for newcomer children’s adjustment may benefit from targeting children’s daily lives in school- and family settings, and promoting their emotion coping skills.

Authors

• Ju-Hyun Song, California State University - Dominguez Hills
  Presenting Author

• Keng-Hie Song, Daegu University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Tina Malti, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author