How Can Children Exposed to War and Displacement Flourish?

Goal

An estimated 68.5 million men, women, and children (1% of the world population) have been forcibly displaced, with "the experience of becoming and being a refugee marked by long-term uncertainty" (El-Shaarawi, 2015, p. 39). Over half of refugees are children (UNHCR, 2019). Refugees face the demands of adjustment to living in host communities after prolonged exposure to insecurity, fear, and loss. Early life is critical to health and wellbeing throughout the lifespan, and it is thus important to understand how these experiences impact child refugees. Particularly salient is how war, displacement, and poverty affect youth positive development. We are gain increasing knowledge about how to promote flourishing about youth - largely in high-income countries - but have little information about those living in low- and middle-income countries or for refugee children.
The best way to gain this knowledge would be to conduct a (or multiple) large-scale cohort study of refugee children and adolescents. If we want to understand how resilience and flourishing can be promoted in even the most challenging of contexts worldwide, we should examine a large group of refugee children and their families over time.

Opportunity

There are a number of large-scale longitudinal studies of children's development. A smaller proportion of those include the types of positive outcome variables which could be used to identify flourishing. A still much smaller proportion are conducted with children in low- and middle-income country (LMIC) contexts. This is problematic as ~90% of the world's children live in LMICs. Together, this is a major gap: we do not know what predicts flourishing for young people outside of high-income countries. Worse still, there are almost no cohort studies of child refugees in high-income countries and none in LMICs.

Roadblocks

The largest roadblock is in securing the long-term funding needed to conduct a cohort study, and the desire to focus on flourishing. Cohort studies of children require a multi-year commitment and most funding bodies are not able to provide such a commitment.
The second roadblock is in working with NGOs to access and track refugee children. If you want to have samples of refugee children displaced to multiple countries then this would require agreements with a number of different organizations and with governments.

Breakthroughs Needed

There are no breakthroughs needed to conduct this research. The proposed research itself would certainly lead to many breakthroughs in terms of answering key questions about child development and how flourishing can be promoted. The main thing standing in the way of this type of research being done is that most funders have small-scale funding which would not allow for the type of study that can answer these big, important questions. The focus on piecemeal funding of a few hundred thousand or a few million dollars to different projects prevents the sort of large-scale projects that are needed to really answer fundamental questions about positive youth development.

Key Indicators of Success

This would be assessed based on the size of the samples collected, how much of the sample is retained at each time point, how many researchers have accessed and published using the data, and whether additional funding sources have been found to maintain the study. At 3 and 5 years, success would largely be about data collection and retention. At 10 years it would largely be about how the data has been used to answer key developmental questions and whether the study is able to continue with outside sources of funding.

Additional Information

5 DOIs:
https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2015.590103
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(11)60050-0
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13031-020-00286-w
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-3016.2008.01011.x
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-008-9312-x

5 Collaborators:
Catherine Panter-Brick
Michael Ungar
Alastair Ager
Theresa Betancourt
Michael Pluess