Psychological and social adjustment in refugee adolescents: The role of parents’ and adolescents’ friendships

Abstract

Friendships have important implications for adolescents' psychological and social adjustment. However, there is still limited evidence on how different same-ethnic and cross-ethnic friendships are formed and regarding their role in refugee adjustment. Therefore, the present study was designed to examine the interplay of parents' and adolescents' same-ethnic and cross-ethnic friendships with adolescents' own psychological and social adjustment among refugee adolescents. Participants were 208 Syrian refugees (71.2% female; M age = 15.35, SD age = 0.95) in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey. Findings indicated that refugee parents' sameethnic and cross-ethnic friendships were positively related to their children's same-ethnic and crossethnic friendships. Moreover, parents' same-ethnic friendships were negatively linked with adolescents' social well-being, whereas parents' cross-ethnic friendships were positively related to adolescents' social well-being. Furthermore, adolescents' sameethnic and cross-ethnic friendships were both positively related to adolescents' social well-being, and cross-ethnic friendships were also positively associated with psychological well-being. These findings suggest that adolescents' cross-ethnic friendships mediated the positive associations of parents' crossethnic friendships with adolescents' social and psychological well-being. Overall, our study provides

The impact of migration on child and adolescent development: Diversity in migration pathways and experiences

“…The next set of articles focus on migration in the European context. The study by Cavdar et al (2021) nicely complements the previous studies conducted on immigrants in Turkey (Akgül et al, 2021;Karataş et al, 2021) by tackling factors that affect the mental health of British-born children of Turkish descent. In particular, the authors document that ethnic identity (examined as a global construct but also looking at distinct components, such as exploration, ethnic resolution, and affirmation) promotes mental health (also examined by considering a multiplicity of indicators).…”

“…The two empirical studies by Akgül et al (2021) and Karataş et al (2021) are conducted among vulnerable groups of migrants in the Middle East (i.e., Turkey). As the country that hosts about six million international migrants, mainly from other countries in the Middle East (i.e., Syria, Iraq) and Europe (i.e., Bulgaria, Germany, North Macedonia), Turkey has witnessed a sharp increase in immigration since 2010, caused especially by the political and economic turmoil in Syria.…”

Migrant youths: Typical aspects of development during the adolescent years, specific challenges of growing up somewhere else, and some things we need to understand better

“…Those young migrants who made the poor-to-rich transition often meet stronger challenges facing the developmental tasks of their period of the lifespan than do majority youths in the receiving country. Several studies in this Issue focused on the mastery of, for example, academic demands and the educational career (e.g., Wang et al, 2021;Yan et al, 2021) as well as on the domain of establishing peer relations (Chavez et al, 2021;Karataş et al, 2021). However, we did not learn about how migrant youths approach the domain of romantic relations.…”

“…By the same token, the former home countries or contexts of heritage of the adolescents who participated in the studies presented in this Issue vary widely and, thus, the reasons that resulted in migration. Refugees who left other Middle East countries such as Syria and Iraq because of armed conflicts and civil war (e.g., Akgül et al, 2021;Karataş et al, 2021) are represented as are young people who escaped from gang violence and crime in Central America (e.g., Patel et al, 2021), or the offspring of Turkish families who migrated to the UK hoping for more favorable economic and occupational opportunities in Northern Europe (Cavdar et al, 2021). Different again is the case of within-country migration as addressed in a study of sons and daughters of migrant workers who left their homes in rural China to make their living in a large Chinese city (Wang et al, 2021).…”

“…It is a particular merit of this Issue to have brought together studies that shed light on the many and varied conditions of development of adolescents who experienced migration themselves or are children of migrant parents. The different host contexts where this research has been conducted are a case in point including countries such as the United States (Patel et al 2021;Yan et al, 2021), Chile (Chávez et al, 2021), Sweden (Gyberg, Svensson, Wängqvist, & Syed, 2021), the UK (Cavdar, McKeown, & Rose, 2021), Germany, Israel (Benbow, Aumann, Paizan, & Titzmann, 2021), Turkey (Akgül, Klimstra, & Çok, 2021;Karataş, Crocetti, Schwartz, & Rubini, 2021), and China (Wang, Chen, & Gong, 2021).…”