Predicting COVID-19 related changes in families’ economic conditions, psychosocial well-being and stress physiology in Jordan

• In Event: Early Life Impacts of COVID-19: Prenatal and Early Childhood

Abstract

Since Jordan’s first recorded case of COVID-19 infection on March 2, 2020 (Ministry of Health, 2020), the added stresses of the coronavirus pandemic and associated public health regulations have severely taxed a country that was already struggling. Jordan has a long history of welcoming refugees from conflict-afflicted parts of the Middle East, and now hosts the second highest share of refugees per capita in the world. Today, within Jordan’s population of approximately 10 million, around 13% are Syrian refugees, 48% of whom are children age 15 and younger (UNHCR, 2019). This has further strained the already-existing national challenges in Jordan, giving rise to public discontent and tensions (Francis, 2015).
In this situation, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating (UNICEF Jordan, 2020). A recent study of Jordanian and Syrian children and their families found that 68% of surveyed households reported disruptions to employment due to the COVID-19 pandemic; many households were pushed into poverty, and did not have adequate finances available to meet their subsistence needs (UNICEF Jordan, 2020). Consistent with the Family Stress Model (e.g., Conger, Rueter, & Conger, 2000) and other family systems frameworks, domestic violence increased, caregivers reported feeling more stress, and they had more difficulties in dealing with their children during the lockdown (UNICEF Jordan, 2020).
These snapshot studies reveal the breadth and depth of the challenges faced by families in Jordan during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, they lacked both temporal perspective on how families’ experiences changed from before to during the quarantine and lockdown, and biopsychosocial perspective on how these experiences may have “gotten under the skin” to affect parents’ and children’s stress neurobiology. The primary aim of this study of Jordanian-born and Syrian refugee families was to address these gaps in our understanding of the impacts of the COVID-19 situation. We had the unique opportunity to follow a sample of 53 families with young children in the greater Amman region from whom we had collected parent-child data (including autonomic, adrenocortical data) in 2019, several months before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In June 2020, 3 months after the start of the public health restrictions and approximately 10 months after the first assessment, we conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with mothers from these families, asking about their own and their child’s well-being, and about economic and social aspects of their lives with regards to the measures taken by the Jordanian government to combat the spread of the coronavirus. In addition, as we had previously, we collected hair samples of mothers and children from which cortisol was assayed, reflecting chronic HPA activation levels over the preceding 3 months.
Informed by life history theory, the family stress model, and the allostatic load framework, we intend to conduct mixed-method, quantitative and qualitative analyses of the changes in families’ economic conditions, psychosocial well-being and stress physiology that occurred from 2019 to June 2020. This is work-in-progress and we anticipate the data analyses to be completed by the time of the biennial meeting.

Authors

• Paul David Hastings, University of California - Davis
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lindsey Partington, University of California - Davis
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rana Dajani, Hashemite University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Antje von Suchodoletz, New York University Abu Dhabi
  Presenting Author