Quality of life of Syrian refugees living in camps in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

Abstract

Medicine, Biological Sciences and Psychology, University of Leicester, UK, LE1 9HN. Email, jm148@le.ac.uk. PrePrints AbstractThe current study explores the perceived quality of life of Syrian refugees who have entered the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Two hundred and seventy participants residing in refugee camps in the Erbil region in Kurdistan completed the WHOQOL-BREF, which measures quality of life (QoL) within four domains; physical, psychological, social relationships and environment. Syrian refugees in Kurdistan scored significantly lower for general population norms on physical health, psychological and environment QoL, and score significantly lower for physical health and psychological QOL for refugees in the Gaza strip. However, respondents in the current sample scored significantly higher on environment QoL to refugees in the Gaza strip, and significantly higher on all the QoL domains than those reported for refugees in West Africa. Finally, Syrian refugees in Kurdistan scored significantly higher than general population norms for environment- The WHOQOL-BREF can be scored in three ways; through raw scores and two transformation methods; the first that creates domain scores within the range of 4-20, and the second that creates domain scores within the range of 0-100.The WHOQOL-BREF's psychometric properties have been analyzed using crosssectional data from 11,830 adults from 23 countries (Sevington, Lofty, & O'Connell, 2004) and is a valid assessment across cultures and socioeconomic status (Hawthorne, Herrman, & Murphy, 2006; Sevington,et al., 2004). Syrian refugees tend to speak the Kurdish language, but have According to the WHOQOL-BREF manual the transformational methods for scoring of the scale allows for missing items. EthicsThe study received ethical approval from the University's School Ethics Board whose ethical procedures conform to those of the British Psychological Society (http://www.bps.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/code_of_human_research_ethics.pdf). TheEthics Reference for the Ethics Board was jm148-851fa. All participants were 18 years of age or over and provided free and informed consent to take part in the study. Formal procedures and permission to visit the camps were given by the General Director of Academic Missions and Cultural Relations and the Democracy and Human Rights Research Institute. ResultsWe found three reported non-clinical based samples that provided enough information to allow statistical mean score comparisons between the current sample and these samples. The first sample was the overall norm data from 11,830 adults from 23 countries (Sevington,et al., 2004).The other two samples comprised samples from refugee populations residing in West Africa (Akinyemi, et al., 2012) Table 1 shows a set of mean comparisons between Syrian refugees in Kurdistan and overall norm data for the WHOQOL-BREF. This comparison uses transformed domain scores within a range 4-20. As our sample data has a missing item, we recomputed the mean/SD score for social relationships QOL f...