Evaluating a culturally and contextually grounded psychosocial support program for adolescents in active migration : addressing conflict management skills
Keywords: Education.

This dissertation focuses on the experiences of adolescents who have been forcibly displaced as a result of structural violence and armed conflicts in their countries of origin. Current investigations into the success of psychosocial support programs for this population suggest that while they are able to improve psychopathological and academic outcomes, interventions often fall short when improving global social and emotional skills. These shortcomings may be due to the rampant issues of sociocultural and contextual incongruence between what the programs teach and what the adolescents and their communities value and need. Current attempts to attune interventions for this population have mostly taken the form of top-down peripheral adaptations that are only at the surface-level, and their components are still rooted in Western and European American definitions of children's adaptive functioning. This is despite the fact that displaced adolescents are often from non-European American sociocultural backgrounds, and they navigate very unique environmental demands. As such, in this dissertation I explore the design and evaluation of a PSS program that is culturally and contextually-logistically grounded in the epistemologies of displaced caregivers, specifically focusing on notions of adaptive conflict management. This dissertation is composed of three studies. In the first and second study, I collaborate with multiple Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to speak with refugee caregivers and learn about their wisdom regarding children's adaptive emotional and social functioning. In the first study, I use a quantitative method and administer a survey through which participants share how they perceive emotions in their children. This study compares refugee beliefs with non-refugee norm scores, and it also explores the heterogeneity within refugee populations. In the second study, we speak with the same population and explore their beliefs about how children should engage in social skills, including conflict management, interpreting social cues, prosocial behaviors, and communication. We conduct semi- structured interviews and analyze the qualitative data. Results of this study clearly indicate that there are discrepancies between how refugee caregivers perceive of successful conflict management skills and how extant PSS programs teach the subject. These results inspired study 3, where we collaborate with displaced caregivers in Tijuana, Mexico, to design and evaluate a PSS programs that is built from the bottom-up and is grounded in their own knowledge. We use a blocked randomized experimental design and evaluate the effectiveness of this program in comparison with culturally adapted top- down intervention. Our results suggest that the bottom- up, culturally and contextually-logistically grounded program was more successful at improving adolescents' conflict management skills. We invite the reader to explore all three studies and learn about the impact of appreciating the wisdom embedded within displaced communities for adolescents' well-being