Perceptions of Stress in Southeast Asian Refugee Youth
Implications For The Development Of Culturally Appropriate Measures
Ilene Hyman, Morton Beiser, Sam Noh, and Nhi Vu
Clinical and research findings suggest that the risk of developing mental health problems such as alcohol abuse (Morgan, Wingard, and Felice, 1984), drug addiction (Amaral-Dias, Vicente, and Cabrita, 1981), delinquency and depression (Burke, 1982), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Kinzie, 1986; Sack, 1985), and psychopathology (Kinzie, Sack, and Angell, 1986) is higher for children in refugee families than for their host country counterparts. Explanations have tended to center on the direct experience of trauma such as warfare, loss, the danger of escape, and the depriving experiences of refugee camp incarceration. However, children born to refugee families in resettlement countries, or who migrate at such young ages that they directly experience little premigration trauma, also suffer higher than expected rates of psychopathology (Freyberg, 1980; Kestenberg and Brenner, 1986). Research with adult refugees highlights the importance of postmigration stresses in the genesis of psychiatric disorders (Canadian Task Force on Mental Health Issues Affecting Immigrants and Refugees, 1988). Both observations suggest a need to study the postmigration stresses faced by children in refugee families. Stress event lists must be tailored for the specific populations under investigation (Turner and Wheaton, 1995). Commonly used inventories of life events and "hassles" are probably inappropriate for studies of the impact of stress on the mental health of children in refugee families. These instruments, developed for populations living under more or less predictable conditions, fail to capture the range of pre- and post-migration situations experienced by refugee children. The fact that dominant culture provides the referent framework for most stress inventories, although many refugee children are members of visible minority groups, is another source of difficulty. Inventories developed for use among dominant culture youth typically do not include stresses related to feelings of marginalization and discrimination, common to many new immigrant and ethnocultural groups.
