Wars and internal conflicts displace millions of people, forcing them to leave their homes. During the European refugee crisis in 2015-2016, there was a high influx of children and youth coming to Europe without their parents or other legal caretakers. Unaccompanied asylum-seeking and refugee minors (URMs) came to Norway as asylum-seekers and some of them resettled as refugees. They came from regions with conflicts, such as Afghanistan and Syria, to pursue a hope for a better and safer future. Compared to other youths, URMs report high levels of mental health problems which also persist for years after resettlement in the new country. Despite this, mental health services often lack the capacity and competence to attend to their needs. From a public health perspective, it is important to have more knowledge, not only about their mental health problems, but also about their wellbeing, and to develop knowledge-based interventions and strategies to improve their mental reactions. The overall aim of the present thesis is to gain knowledge about one aspect of wellbeing, namely life satisfaction, and factors associated with life satisfaction in a sample of URMs in Norway.
Data were provided from Coping among Asylum-Seeking and Refugee Minors (CASaRM)-study, carried out by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in the aftermath of the European refugee crisis (2017-2018). In total, 151 URMs living at care centers, reception centers, and in resettlement-municipalities, participated in a low threshold intervention, Teaching Recovery Techniques (TRT). TRT is a group-based intervention with five modules. In the CASaRM-study, TRT was available in Dari, Pashto, Arabic, Tigrinya, and Somali. The intervention was delivered by trained personnel serving the URMs, in the local communities all over Norway, where they resided. Most of the participants were males from Afghanistan, which was the largest group of URMs that came to Norway at that time. Data was collected at baseline before the TRT, two weeks after TRT, and eight weeks after TRT.
The main results from this thesis show that 1) URMs overall level of life satisfaction is low, and especially if the youth have received rejection on their asylum application; 2) post migration stressors, such as daily hassles and asylum status, negatively predict life satisfaction beyond the impact of traumatic exposure; 3) Life satisfaction is associated with improvement in certain aspects of mental health in this group of youth, such as depressive symptoms and self-efficacy; 4) Participation in TRT is positively associated with life satisfaction among URMs. However, the intervention is most beneficial for youth with a residence permit. Hence, it is important to consider URM’s post-migration stressors and context when implementing psychological interventions.
The low levels of life satisfaction imply a need for action, both in terms of further monitoring and in terms of efforts to ensure URM’s wellbeing. The complexity of individual factors and contextual stressors they are exposed to implies that we need to understand how they relate to each other, and we need interventions that take several contextual levels into consideration. Post-migration stressors, such as daily hassles and asylum status, seem to be especially relevant for URM’s life satisfaction. This infers that interventions that aim to increase life satisfaction, or other aspects of wellbeing, may target pre-migration as well as post-migration stressors. Increased life satisfaction in a group of children and youth with high levels of post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) can have positive effects on their mental health, implying the potential resilience capacity of life satisfaction. Overall, this thesis contributes to more knowledge about the life satisfaction of a group of children and youth in vulnerable situations, by assessing levels of life satisfaction, examining relevant predictors and outcomes of life satisfaction, and identifying a potential useful intervention to promote better life satisfaction. This information is valuable for both people responsible for strategic policies and practices regarding the URMs, and for the local care network employees responsible for scaffolding the support of the URMs’ daily lives.