Perspectives and feelings of refugee children from Syria and Iraq about places and relations as they resettle in Australia

Abstract

Refugee children's experiences are situated in specific places where they interact with significant people. They are not usually asked about their perspectives although they are social agents with distinctive perspectives and feelings about relationships and events. We investigated the perspectives of refugee children on their experiences of places and relations as they resettled in Australia after their families fled from violence in Syria and Iraq and transitioned through Middle Eastern countries. One hundred-and-nine children chose to work with a computer program in either English or Arabic. They sorted feelings associated with home, school, and where they lived before and rated being nurtured at home. Hierarchical cluster analysis revealed five subgroups of children with distinctive patterns in their sorting of eight feelings for three places. Three subgroups had patterns of positive feelings about home and school. Two smaller subgroups had mixed, ambivalent feelings about either school or home. One subgroup was strongly positive, and two others were negative about before settlement. Subgroups identified on their sortings of feelings differed in their experiences of being nurtured, with positive feelings of places related to higher ratings of being nurtured at home. The study points to the importance of children's perspectives and feelings in how they interpret experiences with people and places and argues against assuming that refugee children are homogeneous in their experiences or perspectives.

Keywords

children's feelings children's perspectives patterns place refugee children relations resettlement

Refugee children's lives are situated in multiple places throughout their experiences of dislocation, transition, and resettlement. In each successive place, children engage in ‘place-making’ that involves interacting with people and institutions in a particular place and giving that place meaning that reflects their key relationships (Brun, 2001; Christensen, 2003; Davidson & Milligan, 2004; Denov & Akesson, 2013; Harju, 2013). Children, like all social agents, construct perspectives about who and what matters in their sociocultural environment, shaping their perspectives with cultural and personal priorities and expressing their personalized meanings (Kuczynski & De Mol, 2015; Valsiner, 2014). Unfortunately, refugee children are rarely consulted about their perspectives (Lippman et al., 2009; Wernesjö, 2011), despite evidence that children's perspectives differ from those of parents and others (Morantz et al., 2011; Thoresen et al., 2016), and despite the value of children's insights for promoting their well-being (Casas, 2011; Due et al., 2014; Escot et al., 2016; Lawrence et al., 2019b; Lippman et al., 2009). The purpose of the present study was to consult recently arrived refugee children from Syria and Iraq, by facilitating their expressions of their perspectives about places and relationships in their lives, and representing patterns in their perspectives faithfully and with respect. We concentrated on the relational aspects of children's perspectives in the feelings they expressed about three significant places in their refugee experiences: their current homes and schools and where they lived before coming to Australia.

Children and places

A growing interest in children as socially situated agents has promoted research on how they relate to places as physical and symbolic articulations of social relationships (Brun, 2001; Christensen, 2003; Harju, 2013). Places play a particular role in children's lives, facilitating the integration of cognitive, social, and emotional experiences by concretizing images. This concretized, place-making work, according to Denov and Akesson (2013), allows children to reciprocally construct a sense of place that is linked to their relations with people as one image feeds into another.

Feelings are an important but often overlooked aspect of children's perspectives and have a particular relevance to their sense of belonging in different places (Davidson & Milligan, 2004; Muir & Gannon, 2016). Home is associated with feelings of belonging and being valued. As a place, home represents the primary family relationships that, when available, give refugee children security, and when unavailable or deficient put their well-being at risk (Kaplan, 2013; Marley & Mauki, 2019; Measham et al., 2014). Meanings of home may extend beyond the physical situation to merge immediate and distant relationships and include family members living elsewhere (Lawrence et al., 2016, 2019a; Kaplan, 2013; Muir & Gannon, 2016). Its meanings may spill over into school or neighborhood (Akesson, 2014; Kia-Keating & Ellis, 2007) or be affected by importation of feelings about other people and places (e.g., friends or school). Conflicted perspectives on a place are not always reconciled, especially when they are accompanied by ambivalent feelings and personal associations (Davidson & Milligan, 2004), or when they are compared with meanings for other places (Cena et al., 2018). Akesson (2014), for instance, observed Palestinian children's conflicting images of their homes as both castles that made them safe and cages that held them back from surrounding violence. Cena et al. (2018) found that children of returning Albanian migrants interpreted Albania's constricted, concrete towns as poor places for play in comparison with open play spaces they associated with the places they lived in exile.

Refugee children's experiences and perspectives

The lives of children from Syria and Iraq are situated in multiple places, both chronologically through their transitional experiences, and simultaneously as separated family members reach out across geographical borders through social media (Brun, 2001). Their families were a targeted intake, when in 2015 the Australian government announced 12,000 extra humanitarian visas for people fleeing from conflict in Syria and Iraq, prioritizing persecuted minorities who sought refuge in neighboring countries (Collins et al., 2018). Most were members of Assyrian-Chaldean and Syriac cultural groups who settled in supportive communities that had arrived earlier. The children attend local schools and receive government-sponsored English language education. School multicultural workers and community members assist families with resettlement tasks and other agencies are funded to help them access health and social services.

As families resettle, children need to manage the continuing effects of pre-settlement traumatic events of displacement, loss, broken schooling, and deprivation that without appropriate support may continue to disturb their physical and mental health, attachments, and management of everyday negotiations with family, friends, and school (Juang et al., 2018; Kaplan et al., 2016; Measham et al., 2014). Resettlement raises its own difficulties (e.g., racism and discrimination) that for some children cumulatively intensify the effects of pre-settlement separation and loss (Montgomery, 2011). Most children encounter new challenges in adjusting to school (Kaplan et al., 2016), although schools also are primary places of safety that promote refugee children's belonging and psychosocial adjustment (Kia-Keating & Ellis, 2007). For example, one group of newly arrived primary school children were anxious about progressing from specialized language classes into mainstream classes where they would need to use English (de Heer et al., 2016).

Children from similar backgrounds typically differ in their expressions of individualized thoughts and feelings about their well-being (Camfield et al., 2009). Place-related meanings are likely to vary within as well as across children (Cena et al., 2018; Denov & Akesson, 2013; Harju, 2013) without signifying pathology (Brun, 2001; Wernesjö, 2011). Many refugee children have demonstrated recovery and resilience especially when interacting with supportive sociocultural environments (Marley & Mauki, 2019; Montgomery, 2011; Ungar et al., 2013).

In summary, having experienced disrupted lives across multiple places, individual refugee children can be expected to have varying thoughts and feelings about different places in their lives and the relationships they associate with those places. Understanding the variability in their perspectives calls for methodological approaches, materials, and interpretations that enable children to express their views freely, and enable researchers to represent children's views with respect. As demonstrated by Sommer et al. (2010), that understanding comes with adopting a child perspective to design research methods and materials that facilitate children's expressions of their own child perspectives.

Approach to understanding children’s place-related perspectives

Our approach to understanding refugee children's perspectives had two related aims: using a computer-assisted interview (CAI) that allowed children to express their thoughts and feelings with ease; and making analyses of distinctive patterns in their perspectives on places and relationships that they displayed in multiple sorting choices and ratings.

CAIs facilitate children's management of their responses to research tasks, and have elicited confident and informative expressions of emotional reactions by young children and children from a range of cross-cultural groups (Fängström & Eriksson, 2020; Lawrence et al., 2013). The CAI for this study presented children with accessible and attractive tasks in their choice of customized versions of an animated story about either a girl or a boy in English or Arabic language.

Children's computer-assisted sorting and rating responses yield multiple data points suitable for identifying distinctive patterns in their expressed perspectives without distorting their original expressions (von Eye & Bogat, 2006). Analysis of patterns in individuals’ multiple data points is a priority concern of the person-oriented approach that, as von Eye and Bogat (2006) elegantly established, retains participants’ emphases and brings out the distinguishing and common features of typical and atypical responses made by subgroups and individuals in a specified sample. Simultaneous analysis of patterns across multiple variables provides an alternative to using single variables and making aggregating reductions that may distort participants’ original perspectives and lose their overall meanings. Abunimah and Blower (2010), for example, were able to distinguish different patterns among the needs and life circumstances of a group of separated refugee children seeking asylum in Ireland. Cho (2014) was able to distinguish countries by the different patterns she revealed in their provisions for their needy children.

In a prior study, we analyzed the patterns in multiple indicators of well-being obtained from 37 refugee children (aged 7 to 13) using the ‘Living in Australia’ CAI (Lawrence et al., 2019a). The children were receiving services from a non-government trauma-oriented agency, Victorian Foundation for the Survivors of Torture (VFST). Patterns across multiple ratings and diagram constructions revealed by cluster analysis distinguished three subgroups with distinctive high, moderate, and low levels of well-being. One subgroup with consistently high levels of well-being differed from low- and moderate-level subgroups in consistently expressing indicators of faring well with little worrying and no intrusive worries. In contrast, a subgroup with low levels of well-being expressed indicators of not faring well, worrying about family members, and having worries that intruded in their daily functions. A subgroup with moderate levels of well-being had less severe and less intrusive worries. Most children agreed that family and friends were what helped them to feel better. These children came from a number of refugee backgrounds and were receiving trauma-related services.

For the present study, we were interested in the perspectives of a school-based sample from a relatively homogenous cultural group from Syria and Iraq recently resettled in Australia. Specific aims were to describe any distinctive patterns of feelings children associated with significant places in their lives: home and school in Australia, and where they lived before coming to Australia; and to investigate how different subgroup patterns of feelings were related to children's perspectives of being happy and nurtured as their families resettled.

A related paper reported the prominence of family relations in these children's typed open-ended comments about who helps them most and explanations of their worries (Lawrence et al., 2019b). Most children (80%) mentioned family members in response to the question, ‘Is there anyone or anything that helps you feel better?’ This was in excess of 23% who mentioned friends and 10% school or teachers, with 7% taking the available option not to answer. The concentration on family was not surprising, given the support surrounding them and the cultural centrality of family closeness in their community (Collins et al., 2018; Escot et al., 2016). The children's expressions of personalized meanings for both similar and different worry ratings point to the value of going further than group aggregate responses to identify subgroup emphases.

Method

Participants

Participants were 109 children (59 girls) from grades 3 to 6 in 12 State and Catholic primary schools in northern districts of metropolitan Melbourne. They had a mean age of 10.80 years (SD = 1.09, Range = 8.42–12.92), and had arrived in Australia from Syria or Iraq via transit countries within the past three to 36 months (M = 14.51, SD = 9.99). They came via Turkey (28%), Lebanon (23%), Jordan (23%), or directly from Syria or Iraq (17%), with 9% from other countries or not sure. They were predominantly of Assyrian-Chaldean background and had lived in multi-lingual countries where, with the exception of Turkey, Arabic is the official language.

Procedures and ethics

All procedures and materials were approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee of the Victorian Foundation for the Survivors of Torture (VFST) and by Victorian State and Catholic Departments of Education. Schools selected children and sent home parents’ consent materials in English and Arabic with offers of further explanation by school and VFST cultural workers. Children with parental consent were specifically asked for their own informed consent at the interview using illustrated English and Arabic materials and verbal explanations in a child's preferred language.

Children worked on laptops individually with one of four trained multilingual female research assistants, with the first author present for all sessions to make any referrals (none were needed). Each child was invited to choose a boy or girl version of the CAI computer program in either English or Arabic language (65% chose English), and to talk with the researcher in any combination of English, Arabic, and Assyrian-Chaldean. Seventeen percent spoke only English; 43% Arabic or Arabic and English; and 39% Assyrian-Chaldean or combinations with Arabic and English. Arabic and English versions of the CAI were developed in tandem, adapting earlier English CAIs (Lawrence et al., 2013, 2019b) with input from multilingual cultural workers and children. English-to-Arabic and Arabic-to-English expressions were matched (e.g., English ‘grown-up’ was changed to ‘adult’ because it covers older siblings in Arabic). Story agents’ names (Zaid and Noor) and the idiomatic use of ‘OK’ were checked for cultural understanding. Lawrence et al. (2017) describe educational and programming details, and Lawrence et al. (2019b) report qualitative analyses of children's responses to open-ended questions about who and what helped them and worried them.

CAI and measures

Life in Australia

An opening task introduced children to using color-coded response buttons, referring them to the universal meaning of traffic light colors. Children showed if they were happy in Australia by clicking a green button with the clear label ‘Yes, I am mostly happy to be living in Australia’; or a red button labelled ‘No, I am mostly not happy …’; or an intermediate yellow button labelled ‘A bit happy and a bit not happy …’. A later question used similar buttons and labels for rating ‘mostly OK.’

Feelings about places

Children indicated their association of eight feelings with three places: Home, School, and Before (where they lived before Australia). They dropped name tags for each place into one of a pair of baskets labelled with a feeling or its direct negation (e.g., loved, not loved) for eight randomly presented pairs. A similar sorting task provided evidence of different configurations of feelings from refugee and local elementary school children associated with home, school, friend's house, and either where they lived before (refugees) or their suburb (locals) (Lawrence et al., 2013). Eight positive feelings in the present study are shown in Table 1.

Table 1.

Percentages of five cluster subgroups expressing eight positive feelings about three places.

	C1 (n = 29)	C2 (n = 34)	C3 (n = 17)	C4 (n = 18)	C5 (n = 11)	Sig.
Place: Feeling
Home:
Happy	100	100	100	78	82	*
Loved	97	97	100	94	91	ns
Safe	100	88	94	89	100	ns
Not angry (R)	97	97	94	83	09	*, b
Not lonely (R)	86	100	94	94	27	*, c
Not sad (R)	97	100	88	89	55	*
Not scared (R)	97	85	100	89	64	*
Not worried (R)	100	94	88	83	18	*, b
School:
Happy	100	94	100	78	91	*
Loved	97	91	100	67	82	*
Safe	97	91	94	61	91	*
Not angry (R)	100	94	94	67	64	*
Not lonely (R)	97	94	82	89	82	ns
Not sad (R)	100	97	94	78	64	*
Not scared (R)	100	94	100	44	100	*, c
Not worried (R)	93	91	76	56	82	*
Before:
Happy	100	65	12	83	100	*, c
Loved	83	82	29	83	82	ns
Safe	100	29	0	56	55	*, d
Not angry (R)	100	94	0	89	0	*, a
Not lonely (R)	100	97	53	83	36	*, a
Not sad (R)	100	56	06	72	73	*, c
Not scared (R)	100	65	18	44	45	*, c
Not worried (R)	97	24	29	83	27	*, d

Note. (R) = Negative feeling reversed; * = Multivariate GLM, F(96, 336) = 12.32, p < .001, η² = .78 and Univariate GLM, F(4, 104) ≥ 2.85, p = .02. 4 DFs with % of variance: a = C1 > (C3, C5) = , DF1: 52%; b = C3 > (C4, C5), DF2: 26%; c = C5 > (C3, C4), DF3: 15%; d = (C1, C3) > C2, 7%.

Being nurtured

Children rated 10 items in response to the stem question ‘At home how much do you think you are …’ The rating scale was demonstrated by an animation of four glasses filling to different levels with progressive labels (0, ‘not at all’, 1, ‘a little bit’, 2, ‘more than a little bit’, 3, ‘a lot’) and thumbnail illustrations. Nine items had a Cronbach's alpha of .80 for other school children from refugee backgrounds (Lawrence et al., 2017). For this sample, 10 items with five reversals of negative items yielded mean ratings of: being loved, listened to, looked after, guided, protected, not hurt, not upset, not treated unfairly, feeling generally good, and able to do things they wanted (α = .63). Children finally were asked to evaluate the program by clicking on 0 to 5 stars.

Analyses

We used Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (Ward's Method, Squared Euclidean Criterion) to classify subgroups of children based on their distinctive patterns of sorting eight positive feelings about three places. We used children's 24 individual sorting choices rather than aggregating them (von Eye & Bogat, 2006). Cluster subgroups were confirmed by Discriminant Function and Multivariate GLM Analyses. We interpreted subgroup percentages for each positive feeling for each place as: high, 67–100%; moderate, 34–66%; or low, 0–33%. To examine the relations of cluster subgroup to children's perspectives on their lives, we compared cluster mean scores using Multivariate and Univariate repeated measures GLMs, and Helmert contrasts to compare each cluster's mean with the mean of other clusters in an ordered set (C1 to C5) to obtain orthogonal, independent, and sensible subgroup comparisons.

Results

Identifying cluster subgroups: Feelings about places

Five cluster subgroups were identified by distinctive, non-overlapping patterns in their sorts of eight feelings for Home, School, and Before. Most children expressed positive feelings, as shown in Table 1, with high percentages in three of five cluster subgroups associating positive feelings with home and school. Five clusters were confirmed for 97% (106) as shown in Table 1, as follows:

C1: All Positive Feelings. Most of these 29 children had all (eight) positive feelings for each of Home, School, and Before, with 24 high percentages.

C2: Positive Feelings for Home and School. Most of this largest subgroup (34) had positive feelings for Home and School with 16 high percentages. For Before, their pattern was mixed, with few children feeling safe or not worried.

C3: No Positive Feelings for Before. Most of the 17 children had positive feelings for Home and School with 16 high percentages. For Before, C3 had only one moderate percentage (not lonely), and five low percentages, and none feeling safe or not angry.

C4: Mixed Feelings for School. Most of the 18 children had positive feelings only for Home, with eight high percentages. For School, C4 had five high percentages for happy, loved, not angry, not lonely, not sad, and three moderate percentages for safe, not scared, not worried. For Before, C4 had six high percentages and two moderate percentages for safe, not scared.

C5: Mixed Feelings for Home and Before. These 11 children had only three high percentages for Home, with most feeling happy and loved, and all feeling safe; and three low percentages with few feeling not angry, not lonely, or not worried. For School, C5 had six high percentages with all feeling not scared. For Before, C5 had three high percentages, all felt happy and most felt loved, but none felt not angry. No C5 child had high percentages for all three places.

The five cluster subgroups did not differ in their sex composition, age, or months in Australia, but they differed in whether they worked on English or Arabic versions. More children in C2 chose the English version (79%) and more in C4 the Arabic (76%), χ² (4, 109) = 12.23, p = .02.

Relation to life in Australia

Clusters had different ratings for Being Nurtured but not for happiness or OK. On the Being Nurtured Scale, there was a significant effect for cluster, F(4, 89) = 8.60, p = .00, η² = .28; but no significant interactions or main effects involving sex (p = .19), language version (p = .81), or months in Aus. (p = .50). Cluster means are shown in Table 2.

Table 2.

Mean ratings of experiences of being nurtured at home, for cluster subgroups.

	Mean	SD	Sig.
Cluster subgroups: Being Nurtured at Home Scale
C1: All positive feelings	2.71	.18	a
C2: Positive feelings for Home, School	2.62	.33	b
C3: No positive feelings for Before	2.47	.39	c
C4: Mixed feelings for School	2.27	.33	ns
C5: Mixed feelings for Home, Before	2.20	.28

Note. a = C1 > (C2-C5); b = C2 > (C3- C5); c = C3 > (C4, C5).

C1's mean was higher than the combined mean for all other clusters; C2's was higher than the combined mean for C3, C4, and C5; C3's was higher than the combined mean for C4 and C5, p = .01. C4's was not different from C5's, p = .41.

Clusters did not differ in their ratings of happiness and ‘mostly OK,’ with most children being positive, and children choosing the English version on average being more positive than those choosing Arabic. A GLM repeated measures analysis revealed that children had higher ‘happy in Australia’ than ‘things mostly OK’ mean scores (1.85 [SD = .38] > 1.63 [.52]), F(1, 89) = 6.30, p = .02, η² = .07; with a weak correlation of .19, p = .05. Children choosing the English version had a higher combined mean for Happy, 1.93 (.26) and OK, 1.70 (.46) than children choosing the Arabic version, 1.71 (.52) and 1.50 (.60) respectively, F(1, 89) = 6.17, p = .02, η² = .07. There was no difference for version or cluster in evaluation of the program, with the sample mean of 4.82 being extremely high (SD = .57).

Discussion

Our aims were to understand refugee children's perspectives on significant places in their lives as their families resettled in Australia after fleeing violence in Syria and Iraq. We adopted a child perspective to develop a computer-assisted interview that would enable refugee children to express their feelings about places in either English or Arabic. Our analyses showed a generally positive picture of children happily emplaced in home and school. We also found subgroup patterns in the feelings children associated with different places, that is, home and school in Australia and where they lived before resettlement.

Five distinctive patterns were differently associated with children's perspectives on being nurtured at home but not about being happy living in Australia: with being happy endorsed by most children. Findings pointing to the happy early resettlement of a group of refugee children should not be overlooked or diminished by viewing them through lenses oriented to pathology or victimhood (Brun, 2001; Wernesjö, 2011). Evidence of resettlement experiences of pre-adolescent children are particularly scarce in the USA, according to Bettmann et al. (2017). In Australia, there are mixed indicators of resettlement challenges for young children's development and learning, possibly due to different methodological approaches and informants (e.g., Due et al., 2014; Kaplan et al., 2016; VSFT, 2020).

As an identifiable cultural group, these Assyrian-Chaldean children had their resettlement challenges eased by the type of supportive social environment that usually underpins children's recovery and resilience (Juang et al., 2018; Marley & Mauki, 2019; Ungar et al., 2013). Their families entered directly into welcoming communities established around churches and schools by people from their countries who spoke their languages (Collins et al., 2018). Children were embedded in heritage culture as they engaged with mainstream culture primarily through schools that provided learning and acculturation support. Their identification of family as their main source of help (Lawrence et al., 2019b) is consistent with other children's experiences (Measham et al., 2014; VFST, 2020), and resonates with expressions of family cohesion that made Lebanon a comfortable place for other refugee children from Syria (Escot et al., 2016).

Within this generally positive picture, the systematic analysis of subgroup patterns of perspectives extends claims made by Camfield et al. (2009) and Harju (2013) that children in similar situations construct individualized views about the factors impacting on their lives. The evidence of children's personalized perspectives was sharpened in this study by giving children the opportunity to discriminate between places using a simple sorting task that revealed feeling-by-place patterns. The patterns yielded pre-settlement and settlement comparisons finer grained than the perspectives of better places for playing (Cena et al., 2018). Identification of five distinctive patterns across all positive and negative feelings is fresh evidence of children's differential perspectives and place-making (Camfield et al., 2009; Denov & Akesson, 2013). Pattern analysis of subgroups avoids undue reductions of the breadth and particularities of participants’ individualized responses, and retains the totality of their perspectives in ways that single variable analyses cannot (von Eye & Bogat, 2006).

While some children associated feeling happy, loved, and safe with their pre-settlement place as well as with home and school now, others expressed feelings that contrasted their current happy situations with mostly negative or specifically worrying and unsafe pre-settlement situations. The finding that two subgroups were not consistently positive about home or school fits well with dialectical accounts of children's constructions of their own meanings and feelings in their interactions with all levels of the sociocultural environment. Dialectical developmental theories see children not as passive recipients of adults’ socialization, but as active agents who contribute to change by their opposition to, agreement with, or negotiation of adult views (e.g., Kuczynski & De Mol, 2015; Valsiner, 2014). That some felt worried and angry about home as well as safe, happy, and loved at the same time is critical information in light of the central meaning given to home by children who have been displaced (Harju, 2013; Muir & Gannon, 2016). Palestinian refugee children's castle/cage images pointed to a similar ambivalence (Akesson, 2014) and exemplify how children can be aware of family difficulties and make their own adjustments (Kaplan, 2013).

Ambivalence about school expressed by one subgroup (C4) corroborated Harju’s (2013) finding of mixed opinions about their new Swedish neighborhoods and schools in a sample of refugee children. Ambivalence in the present study meant that not all the C4 subgroup felt happy, loved, or safe and around half felt scared and worried. The need to belong is critical in a new country (Correa-Velez et al., 2010; Due et al., 2014; Kia-Keating & Ellis, 2007). Further analyses of links between ambivalent feelings about school and the length of children's time in a new country and language proficiency may help explain the lack of a sense of belonging among newly arrived youth in the Correa-Velez et al. (2010) study, and the hesitancy about exposing a lack of English proficiency found by de Heer et al. (2016). The patterns of school-related feelings of 10 children who worked on the computer task in Arabic were similar to those of eight working in English, despite their having been in the country for a mean of seven months (Arabic group) compared with 19 months (English group).

As far as we can discern, this is the first study of refugee children's perceptions of pre-settlement and settlement places that takes further the comments of children of Albanian returning migrants in Cena et al.'s (2018) study. Those children saw Albanian spaces as less suitable for play than the open spaces they had experienced in exile. Places and situational emplacement have special relevance in the imagery and emotions by which children connect relations and experiences across time and space (Brun, 2001; Christensen, 2003). Individual children's images of home may incorporate family members located elsewhere or in their memories of a personal past (Harju, 2013; Muir & Gannon, 2016). Children from refugee backgrounds often include displaced family members in their images of their present lives (Lawrence et al., 2019a), and we allowed the children to work with their own images of home.

As social agents interacting with the sociocultural environment, refugee children's feelings and thoughts about places and relations are different from those of adults (Morantz et al., 2011), and gaps appear in accounts of their well-being and acculturation when children's perspectives are not incorporated into research and policy decisions (Casas, 2011; Goodnow & Lawrence, 2015; Watters, 2008). This study gives a basis for adding children's perspectives on their relationship with, and commitment to, space and place when designing services to provide resources that promote children's well-being. Once the perspectives of refugee children are recognized as the constructions of social agents, they also will be acknowledged to be personal as well as cultural, separate from those of parents, emotionally valanced, and worthy of being expressed and heeded in research and decision processes (Goodnow & Lawrence, 2015). For researchers and policymakers, the methodological task is to enter into refugee children's worlds (Due et al., 2014; Sommer et al., 2010). With the focus of enabling children's expression of their perspectives, systematic comparisons can be linked to the exploration of meanings. Further studies could add follow-up questions about specific reactions and deeper meanings; for example, whether children experienced place-specific threats to their self-esteem and cultural identity, given the significance of those variables for long-term well-being (Correa-Velez et al., 2015) and for reciprocal place-making and relationship construction (Denov & Akesson, 2013). Refugee children are engaged in multiple negotiations with adults at the same time as negotiating their own acculturation and developmental tasks (Juang et al., 2018). Not all family relations are supportive, and children can be astute observers of parenting styles and shortcomings (Kaplan, 2013). Each child's perspectives and meanings are both social and personal as they are constructed and reconstructed in reciprocal, relational negotiations (Valsiner, 2014).

Limitations

The findings may not generalize to children in other refugee groups with less family, cultural, and structural support. With our focus on comparative places and feelings, we have not included past or present correlates of children's feelings. Naturally, feelings do not exhaust the range of children's perspectives or the complexities of experiences and attitudes contributing to their well-being (Casas, 2011), and interpretation of the findings would be strengthened with personal correlates of self-esteem and belonging. The innovative methodological approach for obtaining and analyzing patterns across multiple variables (feelings) for targets (places) now can be applied to other aspects of children's perspectives, such as place-related satisfaction or marginalization, or to children's future orientations to other places (e.g., sports venues, high school). The sorting task was accessible, did not raise children's anxieties, and could be used to explore other responses to places and relationships. Other refugee children have rated similar tasks highly on easiness, fun, and suitability for their age group (Lawrence et al., 2017).

Cluster analysis of patterns is complex, and its present use does not focus on qualitative insights into children's meanings, although there are hints of personalized experiences behind the discriminations and ambivalences. Cluster analysis is suitable for smaller as well as larger samples and can incorporate qualitative with quantitative data (Cho, 2014). The CAI presentation lends itself to qualitative comments and these children demonstrated their ability to make open-ended comments, in English or Arabic, about what helped them to feel better and what worried them (Lawrence et al., 2019b).

The internal consistency of the Being Nurtured Scale was reasonable, although it was stronger with other samples with greater cultural variability (Lawrence et al., 2013, 2017). Either these data were showing close to ceiling effects, or the items were not as suitable as expected, despite extensive piloting and input from cultural experts and children. Three-point ratings are controversial, although the color-coding and the traffic light analogy added sensible explanations.

The major limitation of the study remains its single point of data collection. Longitudinal data are needed to explore changes in patterns of children's perspectives over time, especially in relation to changes in language use and feelings of belonging. It also is important to track children's changing views of their pre-settlement experiences over later phases of resettlement (Montgomery, 2011).

Conclusion

Refugee children are an important part of contemporary life. They have a large presence in refugee groups needing global and local support and they are a large proportion of the world's future population. As social agents, refugee children are active in constructing meanings for different aspects of their sociocultural worlds—perspectives for interpreting, reacting to, and interacting with people and institutions. Their perspectives matter for understanding their interactions and for making decisions about policy and services (Casas, 2011; Goodnow & Lawrence, 2015; Watters, 2008). As we have shown, it is not productive to treat refugee children as a homogeneous set, even within a supportive sociocultural environment. Children's discriminating images and feelings for significant places warrant fine-grained analyses of distinctive patterns. Refugee children's perspectives and place-making activities are critical cues for understanding children's resettlement experiences and should be incorporated into policies and programs designed to foster children's resilience and adaptation as they resettle after displacement.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This project was supported financially by the Victorian Foundation for the Survivors of Torture and The University of Melbourne. We wish to thank Rita Francis, Shamiran Merkhaal, and Salat Youhana for their assistance with data collection. We gladly acknowledge the involvement and cooperation of the staff and students of 12 primary schools. We acknowledge the approval of The Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture Institutional Ethics Committee (2016—04), The Victorian Department of Education, and Victorian Department of Education & Training (2016_003205) & Catholic Education, Melbourne (0539).

Author's note

Ida Kaplan, Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Victorian Foundation for the Survivors of Torture.

ORCID iD

Jeanette A. Lawrence

Jeanette A. Lawrence, PhD (Minnesota), is a developmental psychologist working in an honorary capacity as associate professor in the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences and researcher and evaluator at the Victorian Foundation for the Survivors of Torture. Jeanette has published extensively on personal and social development across the life-course, particularly intergenerational relations, and the experiences of children and young people from refugee backgrounds and their need for a voice for expressing their well-being. She has expertise in developing culturally-appropriate research methods, specializing in the development of computer-assisted interview techniques.

Ida Kaplan, PhD (Melbourne), is a clinical psychologist with specialities in trauma and refugee recovery. She is Principal Consultant of Practice and Research at the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture, and a research fellow in the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences. Ida has developed models of service provision for refugees and asylum seekers and has extensive local and international experience training professionals in appropriate interventions for survivors of torture and trauma. She has a longstanding policy, practice, and research interest in the intersection of mental health, social justice, and human rights. She has conducted research into the effects of long-term detention and methods for assessing the well-being of refugee children and young people.

Dina Korkees completed her Master of Social Work degree at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She is a Community Liaison Worker at Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture providing community services and programs for refugee groups. Her service and research interests are focused on the needs and experiences of women and children resettling in Australia after violence and war in Syria and Iraq.

Mardi Stow completed her Master of International Social Work degree at La Trobe University. She is General Manager of the Community Capacity Building Program at Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture with oversight of community engagement and refugee community recovery. Her service and research interests are in mental health literacy and rebuilding communities post conflict in a trauma recovery framework.

Agnes E. Dodds has a MA (Hons) from the University of Melbourne where she is an honorary associate professor in Medical Education with a speciality in evaluation. She is an honorary evaluator at the Victorian Foundation for the Survivors of Torture. Agnes has published extensively in adult development and education, especially in medical and distance education. Her current research interests are in the development and learning of medical students, and the evaluation of community service programs for refugee groups.

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