Highlighting refugees ’ resilience can boost their confidence and engagement at university

By Emma Young Refugees face all kinds of obstacles to settling well into a new country. One is the “stigmatised identity” of refugees as being weak, unskilled victims, write Christina Bauer at the Free University of Berlin and colleagues in a new paper in Psychological Science. So the team designed a simple intervention to reframe that identity as one characterised instead by perseverance and the ability to cope with adversity. When they tested it with refugees who were studying online, they found that it increased their engagement with their course — which in theory could make for greater future university and career success. In an initial study, the team recruited 93 participants who had come as refugees an average of four years earlier to European countries from mostly the Middle East. All could speak at least basic English. They were asked to imagine that they would soon be studying at a German university that offered free degrees to refugees. A “reframing” group then read passages purported to have been written by previous refugee students about how being a refugee had improved their resilience — how it had helped them to be independent, for example, and not to give up. This group also wrote down things that they themselves had learned as a refugee that might help them to succeed at the university (these were framed as tips that would be shared with future students). A control group was given an intervention that focused on study st...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Educational Source Type: blogs