The Effectiveness of Peer Support to Improve Youth Refugee’s Mental Health
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47611/jsrhs.v12i3.4980Keywords:
Youth refugee, Peer support, Cultural competence, Multicultural Personality Questionnaire, Refugee, Asylum seeker, Multicultural effectivenessAbstract
International geopolitical conflicts and climate change have expanded the international population and have produced an ever increasing number of refugees who are in need of help. However, the restrictive access and discriminatory treatment of refugees have contributed to poor mental and physical health. The lack of cultural competence and multicultural effectiveness (the ability to understand and navigate cross-cultural situations) contributes to worse outcomes with refugees, especially among refugee youth. The refugee youth population experience physical, mental, and emotional trauma while having to adjust to a foreign culture and language. The few current programs aimed at improving the health of refugee youth address most obstacles that refugee youth face, but do not address a key component in psychological wellbeing: social support from peers. An examination of the cultural competence of high school males (n=28) showed that scores were similar across ethnic groups and that scores just passed the midpoint (3.29, 3.21, 3.23), suggesting that students have some cultural competence but have areas of improvement. Future research should focus on more rigorous measures of cultural competence for youth populations. Efforts should be made to improve cultural competence among the non-refugee youth population.
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Copyright (c) 2023 Daniel Yoon; Rosemari Nam, Stephanie Lim
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