Psychological problems and resilience among Syrian adolescents exposed to war

Abstract

There are very few holistic studies that consider a resilience and risk-oriented approach to Syrian adolescent refugees living in Turkey, and most of these studies have been conducted with relatively small samples. Furthermore, dissociation as a universal response to childhood trauma has been neglected by researchers in the study of Syrian adolescents. Therefore, this study aimed to correct this omission by investigating the level of psychological problems (especially dissociation) and resilience with the predictors of those levels, as reported by 430 Syrian adolescents aged between 12 and 18 in Turkey. The prevalence of the participants who had higher than the cut-off value in dissociation was 47.2% and in PTSD was 61.3%. Additionally, in the proportion of medium to severe levels, 72.8% of the participants had anxiety symptoms and 51.5% had depressive symptoms. The level of resilience among the adolescents was about average with 60.7% of the participants displaying moderate to exceptionally high resilience.While the high number of traumatic experiences and use of negative religious coping methods came to the fore as predictors of psychological problems, social support from family and friends and positive religious coping methods were the common predictors for the assessment of higher resilience. The findings from this study may be of assistance to the development of preventive intervention programs for adolescent refugees in general and Syrian adolescent refugees in particular.