Project end date was March 31, 2024
Detailed Project Description: How Settlement and Integration Challenges Influence Identity Formation
RISE Team was a multi-year study conducted with Syrian refugee parents and adolescents in the Greater Toronto Area.
Two-thirds of Syrian refugee newcomers to Canada were children under the age of 18 or the adults caring for them. Not only were these newcomer children and their parents confronting the significant challenges involved in adjusting to life in Canada, they were doing so at stages in life -- adolescence and parenthood – key to identity formation. The social context into which Syrian refugees arrived in Canada was also uniquely fraught with identity-related stigmas. These included an uptick in anti-Muslim bias in North America (Kazemipur 2014; Korteweg and Selby 2012), a wider global backlash against multiculturalism (Kymlicka 2010), and evidence of felt discrimination among refugees in Canada (Kyriakides et al 2018; Satzewich 2015).
Professor Neda Maghbouleh led a team of 3 faculty researchers, 1 postdoctoral fellow and 10 student research assistants in a longitudinal study that grappled with these issues. The team and project was called RISE: Refugee Integration, Stress, and Equity. The project was funded by a 2018-2023 SSHRC Insight Grant for which Maghbouleh served as PI and by the Early Researcher Award that Maghbouleh received from the Province of Ontario in 2018.
The project focused on how Syrian refugee mothers and teens experience family and integration-related stressors in the three to five years following settlement, studying identity formation as well as refugee settlement, family life, integration, and wellbeing. The project used a longitudinal research design to capture both phenomenological changes over time and distinct, time-sensitive observations. It involved multiple waves of Arabic-language interviews, surveys, and community- and team-based participatory action research with more than 50 newcomer households and with two partner agencies.
The project launched in the fall of 2018 and saw the majority of the adolescent participants into young adulthood and observed the parents move through the stages of parenting. We recruited 148 participants from 53 households in Peel and Toronto regions. In Peel region, Dixie Bloor Neighbourhood Centre (DBNC), a leading newcomer settlement agency in Mississauga with whom RISE previously partnered in a pilot project, facilitated recruitment. In Toronto region, Syrian Canadian Foundation and NMC Cultural Exchange and Support Initiative (NMC), two grassroots, Syrian-led organizations facilitated recruitment. To ensure adequate diversity of the sample in terms of sponsorship status and other key variables, the study aimed to match in proportion government versus privately sponsored refugees.
Research assistants conducted 90-minute semi-structured interviews in Arabic or English, according to respondent preference. Questions contained items to identify stressors that undermined refugee parents' wellbeing and the social and personal resources that may buffer the strains experienced in their sense of parenting and family membership. It also included items related to identity-based stigma faced by refugee adults and, in the case of teenage participants, items based on the adolescent discrimination distress index to measure stressors and possible negative stigma mediating younger refugees' integration to Canada. They also included questions about people’s backgrounds and their family composition; stressors and strains linked to child(ren)’s adjustment in school; discrimination in social fields like school, neighbourhood, and community organizations; support resources; and self concepts. The interviewers discussed with participants their lives before landing in Canada (including their identities and experiences as parents or teenagers); their experiences during early settlement, especially in terms of role identity and wellbeing; and “telling cases” that captured achievements and obstacles to their sense of belonging and integration. Annual follow-up interviews and continuous community engagement activities between the research team and the study population gauged longitudinal insights about integration, family-related stress over time, and shifting narratives of identity.
Thanks to interest from respondents and research assistants alike, RISE also engaged in a variety of team-based participatory action research (PAR) activities to further explore issues of integration and identity formation. For example, two newcomer study participants joined RISE in scholarly partnership as co-panelists in a special session at the annual meeting of the Canadian Sociological Association and an additional participant joined RISE Team as a paid research trainee. Several other participants were commissioned to help RISE convene two successful community-building celebrations for local Syrian newcomer families, our University, and partner agencies.
Through its publications and presentations, RISE Team shared lessons – from participants in their own words -- about coming of age, identity, racialization, family, and forging strong selves through crisis.
Detailed Project Description: How Settlement and Integration Challenges Influence Identity Formation
RISE Team was a multi-year study conducted with Syrian refugee parents and adolescents in the Greater Toronto Area.
Two-thirds of Syrian refugee newcomers to Canada were children under the age of 18 or the adults caring for them. Not only were these newcomer children and their parents confronting the significant challenges involved in adjusting to life in Canada, they were doing so at stages in life -- adolescence and parenthood – key to identity formation. The social context into which Syrian refugees arrived in Canada was also uniquely fraught with identity-related stigmas. These included an uptick in anti-Muslim bias in North America (Kazemipur 2014; Korteweg and Selby 2012), a wider global backlash against multiculturalism (Kymlicka 2010), and evidence of felt discrimination among refugees in Canada (Kyriakides et al 2018; Satzewich 2015).
Professor Neda Maghbouleh led a team of 3 faculty researchers, 1 postdoctoral fellow and 10 student research assistants in a longitudinal study that grappled with these issues. The team and project was called RISE: Refugee Integration, Stress, and Equity. The project was funded by a 2018-2023 SSHRC Insight Grant for which Maghbouleh served as PI and by the Early Researcher Award that Maghbouleh received from the Province of Ontario in 2018.
The project focused on how Syrian refugee mothers and teens experience family and integration-related stressors in the three to five years following settlement, studying identity formation as well as refugee settlement, family life, integration, and wellbeing. The project used a longitudinal research design to capture both phenomenological changes over time and distinct, time-sensitive observations. It involved multiple waves of Arabic-language interviews, surveys, and community- and team-based participatory action research with more than 50 newcomer households and with two partner agencies.
The project launched in the fall of 2018 and saw the majority of the adolescent participants into young adulthood and observed the parents move through the stages of parenting. We recruited 148 participants from 53 households in Peel and Toronto regions. In Peel region, Dixie Bloor Neighbourhood Centre (DBNC), a leading newcomer settlement agency in Mississauga with whom RISE previously partnered in a pilot project, facilitated recruitment. In Toronto region, Syrian Canadian Foundation and NMC Cultural Exchange and Support Initiative (NMC), two grassroots, Syrian-led organizations facilitated recruitment. To ensure adequate diversity of the sample in terms of sponsorship status and other key variables, the study aimed to match in proportion government versus privately sponsored refugees.
Research assistants conducted 90-minute semi-structured interviews in Arabic or English, according to respondent preference. Questions contained items to identify stressors that undermined refugee parents' wellbeing and the social and personal resources that may buffer the strains experienced in their sense of parenting and family membership. It also included items related to identity-based stigma faced by refugee adults and, in the case of teenage participants, items based on the adolescent discrimination distress index to measure stressors and possible negative stigma mediating younger refugees' integration to Canada. They also included questions about people’s backgrounds and their family composition; stressors and strains linked to child(ren)’s adjustment in school; discrimination in social fields like school, neighbourhood, and community organizations; support resources; and self concepts. The interviewers discussed with participants their lives before landing in Canada (including their identities and experiences as parents or teenagers); their experiences during early settlement, especially in terms of role identity and wellbeing; and “telling cases” that captured achievements and obstacles to their sense of belonging and integration. Annual follow-up interviews and continuous community engagement activities between the research team and the study population gauged longitudinal insights about integration, family-related stress over time, and shifting narratives of identity.
Thanks to interest from respondents and research assistants alike, RISE also engaged in a variety of team-based participatory action research (PAR) activities to further explore issues of integration and identity formation. For example, two newcomer study participants joined RISE in scholarly partnership as co-panelists in a special session at the annual meeting of the Canadian Sociological Association and an additional participant joined RISE Team as a paid research trainee. Several other participants were commissioned to help RISE convene two successful community-building celebrations for local Syrian newcomer families, our University, and partner agencies.
Through its publications and presentations, RISE Team shared lessons – from participants in their own words -- about coming of age, identity, racialization, family, and forging strong selves through crisis.