Documenting Syrian Refugee Children’s Memories: Methodological Insights and Further Questions

Abstract

Several scholars advocate for children’s experiences to be articulated by children themselves, and some have offered strategies on how to facilitate this. Yet there are hardly any studies that record children’s memories while they are children and offer methodological guidance on how to do so. None that we know of have recorded the unique memories of Syrian refugee children, possibly because of ethical, relational, and practical challenges of working with children considered especially vulnerable due to their age, ethnicity, and experiences as refugees. This article offers an account of how we engaged 13 Syrian refugee children (5–13 years old) in creating their autobiographies—based on memories of their lives in Syria, a transit country, and Canada—which they presented to other children in the study, in the presence of their parents, a school principal, and the researchers. In this article, we identify insights we gained by addressing issues raised by our Research Ethics Board; negotiating our roles and relationships with the children, their parents, and each other; and collecting data from the children in multiple forms. We also raise many questions, which we hope will engage other researchers in developing our collective expertise for recording understudied children’s memories.

Character education through philosophical values in traditional Islamic boarding schools

“…The purpose of each of these papers is to support the findings of the observations and interviews. Research that generates a variety of data types can boost the quantity and quality of research data (Ali & Gibran, 2020).…”

Protecting Refugee Students’ Wellbeing After Research

“…Their reactions seemed to show they expected to continue our relationship after the research concluded. My interests and those of the refugee children did not align, similar to Ali and Gibran’s (2020) observations. They found that researchers need to “make difficult choices to live with the ethical discomfiture that remains” (p. 7), balancing cultural and professional norms.…”

Linking refugee families with the host societies. A mixed-methods evaluation study of family education programmes in Germany (Creando vínculos entre las familias refugiadas y las sociedades de acogida. Una evaluación de métodos mixtos sobre los programas de educación familiar en Alemania)

“…Research conducted with refugee families needs to account for unique family situations and structural contexts that may imply vulnerabilities (Ali & Gibran, 2020). We therefore decided to obtain informed consent orally in the families' first languages before the interviews and observations, emphasizing the voluntary nature of participation and the option of terminating it at any point in time without losing the offered compensation of €60.…”

“…La investigación con familias refugiadas debe tener en cuenta situaciones familiares únicas y contextos estructurales que pueden implicar diversas vulnerabilidades (Ali & Gibran, 2020). Por lo tanto, decidimos obtener el consentimiento informado oral en la lengua materna de las familias participantes antes de realizar las entrevistas y observaciones, haciendo hincapié en el carácter voluntario de la participación y dando la opción de poner fin a la misma en cualquier momento sin riesgo de perder la compensación que ofrecíamos de €60.…”