About this session

Saturday, 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM

Studying the well-being of refugee children with measures of peer experience and the self

Refugee children can be conceived of as a high-risk group. More than other children, refugee children are more likely to have experienced many forms of hardship. The process of adjusting to a new place of living presents other challenges including finding a place in a new peer group, developing new relationships, dealing with the likely reduction in family resources, and the possibility of facing discrimination due to one’s national origins. It is hard not to recognize that refugees constitute a crisis on a global level but also at the level of the individual refugee child.
The three papers in this symposium assess the well-being of refugee children different perspectives. The first paper assesses the intersection between the self and social experience. The findings show that refugee children who experience discrimination-based exclusion at Time 1 were less likely to experience continued exclusion at Time 2 if they had a positive social self-perception. The second study also focused on the self. Mean scores observed on our measures of general self-worth showed higher scores on the measure of negative general self-worth than on the measure of positive general self-worth especially clear for the refugee children. The third study assessed the association between a family resource variable, specifically food insecurity and children’s level of relational aggression. With all three groups food insecurity was a predictor of aggression.
These studies point the importance the refugee experience in light of social experiences.

Paper #1
Title	Refugee Children Differ from Other Children on a Measure of Negative Self Worth
Presenting author	Lina Maria Lopez, Concordia, Canada

Paper #2
Title	The Moderating Role of Positive Social-Self-Perception on the Stability of Discrimination-Based Exclusion Among Refugee Children
Presenting author	Melissa Commisso, Concordia University, Canada

Paper #3
Title	Food insecurity and motivation for peer aggression: A replication and extension with youth in Colombia
Presenting author	Dr. Nicole Dryburgh, Offord Centre for Child Studies and Harvard University, Canada

View all paper details

Session chair
Dr. William M. Bukowski, Ph.D., Concordia University, Canada

Discussant
Dr. Frosso Motti, Ph.D., National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece

⇦ Back to schedule