Daily stressors in the lives of Sri Lankan youth: a mixed methods approach to assessment in a context of war and natural disaster

Abstract

This paper describes the use of a mixed methods design to develop the Sri Lankan Children' s Daily Stressor Scale (CDSS). It brie£y describes its use in a study assessing the relative contribution of daily stressors on the one hand, and war and disaster exposure on the other, to young people' s mental health and psychosocial wellbeing.The authors discuss the neglect of daily stressors; the stressful social and material conditions of everyday life in settings of armed con£ict and natural disaster and o¡er a rationale for the importance of assessing daily stressors when seeking to understand and address mental health and psychosocial needs of con£ict and disaster a¡ected youth. A central focus of the paper is on the unique value of a mixed methods approach to contextually sound measure development.

Growing Pains: The Impact of Disaster‐Related and Daily Stressors on the Psychological and Psychosocial Functioning of Youth in Sri Lanka

“…For each item, participants were asked to indicate whether they experienced that event, from 0 ( never ) to 2 ( more than once ). Further details on the development of this measure are provided elsewhere (Miller, Fernando, & Berger, 2009; Miller, Fernando, Uyanavithanage, Prasad, & Ranawake, 2008). Internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha) of the scale was .75.…”

Contextual Positive Coping as a Factor Contributing to Resilience After Disasters

“…Additionally, life stressors that are not secondary to the trauma but were perhaps already present or arose independently (e.g., academic pressure after the earthquakes in Sichuan; Zheng et al, 2012), may also influence how well a survivor fares afterwards. Evidence for these phenomena is present in both lay (DeLongis, Coyne, Dakof, Folkman, & Lazarus, 1982) and disaster-stricken populations (Henderson, Roberto, & Kamo, 2010;Norris & Uhl, 1993) and is even more prominent in the terrorism and warfare literature (Fernando et al, 2010;Jordans, Semrau, Thornicroft, & Ommeren, 2012;Kohrt et al, 2012;Miller, Fernando, & Berger, 2009;Rasmussen et al, 2010).…”

The first decade of Intervention

“…Over the years, the goals of psychosocial interventions have gone increasingly beyond a narrow concept of mental health (as the ' absence of mental disorder'), in favour of interventions that promote a more holistic version of psychosocial wellbeing. Somasundaram, 2003;Tankink, 2004;Vazquez and Perez-Sales, 2007;Miller, Fernando & Berger, 2009;Schafer et al, 2010), or promoted a focus on resilience (Westerveld-Sassen, 2005;Ward and Eyber, 2009), posttraumatic growth (Kryger and Lindgren, 2011), or mainstreaming psychosocial support into poverty reduction programmes (Salih and Galappatti, 2006). Within the ¢rst ¢ve years of the journal, there was a lot of debate on the relevance and importance of using a trauma focused model.…”