engleski

Risk and Protective Factors of Refugee Adolescent Health and Behaviour

The basic process of adolescent development always changing relations between the individual and the multiple levels of the context, while variation in the quality of these relations represents sources of risk or protective factors in different domains of social life including family, school, peers and wider community. Adolescent refugees face particular challenges: those common to most adolescents related to the individuation process and those experienced after traumatic events as newcomers to a country, related to their psychological and socio-cultural adjustment, their educational opportunities, their cultural traditions and their legal rights. Although they are frequently addressed in programs that are concerned with their specific diseases and health problems, there is no real understanding that their psychological well-being is closely linked to their cross-cultural experiences and intercultural/interethnic relationships. The social experience of being a refugee having to develop practical coping strategies is closely connected to processes of identification in multiethnic contexts and degree of social integration. Based on the interactive model of acculturation, this study considers the relationship of acculturative stress of adolescent refugees as a syndrome manifested by somatic symptoms, lowered mental health status in terms of depression, self-esteem and identity confusion and risk behavior with acculturative attitudes, school adaptation and achievement, family and social support and perceived discrimination. The consideration of both intra-personal and inter-personal factors of adolescent acculturation that can heighten stress, as well as of broader ideological, cultural and socioeconomic context is used to detect mechanisms and processes that can counterbalance health hazards of sequential traumatization.

anthropology; adolescent health; behavior

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