A Typology of Secondary Stressors Among Refugees of Conflict in the Middle East: The Case of Syrian Refugees in Jordan

Conclusions As shown in the introduction, the relief literature does recognise the importance of stressors arising from exile, but it lacks an organised conceptual framework to classify these stressors or to measure them. The only effort that we are aware of is a typology of secondary stressors in disasters18, which was not designed with armed conflicts in mind. We recommend using the term secondary stressors instead of daily stressors, as it includes stressors that are not daily in nature, in addition to traumatic stressors that arise from exile. Our data showed that refugees did occasionally report primary stressors caused by war such as the loss of relatives or property back home, but they clearly emphasised that the main challenges were secondary stressors. Some of the secondary stressors reported by the participant were quite serious and could be considered traumatic (e.g., physical and sexual attacks) which again suggests the flawed use of the term daily stressors, especially when used in contrast with traumatic experiences. We found that Syrian refugees in Jordan suffer the most from financial stressors, due to the loss of income and high living expenses, and deficiency of the services available to them. Social stressors were found among a considerable number of refugees, where they varied from a group of stressors due to being targeted as a refugee by the locals/government (e.g., discrimination) to more traumatic stressors that came from both locals and other refuge...
Source: PLOS Currents Disasters - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Source Type: research