The Importance of Local and Global Social Ties for the Mental Health and Well-Being of Recently Resettled Refugee-Background Women in Australia

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Murray, Kate E
Lenette, Caroline
Brough, Mark
Reid, Katherine
Correa-Velez, Ignacio
Vromans, Lyn
Schweitzer, Robert D
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2022
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Abstract

Social connections are foundational to the human condition and are inherently disrupted when people are forcibly displaced from their home countries. At a time of record high global forced migration, there is value in better understanding how refugee-background individuals engage theirsocial supports or ties in resettlement contexts. A mixed methods research design aimed to understand the complexities of how 104 refugee-background women experienced their social networks in the first few months of resettlement in Australia. One of the research activities involved participants completing a survey with both quantitative and qualitative components. The quantitative analyses identified the impact of post-migration living difficulties that represented social stressors (worry about family, loneliness and boredom, feeling isolated, and racial discrimination) on the women’s mental health outcomes in the months following resettlement. The qualitative data highlighted the complexities of social relationships serving as both stressors and sources of support, and the importance of recognizing extended families and supports around the globe. The findings point to the need for nuanced accounts of the social contexts surrounding refugee resettlement as important influences able to promote trauma-informed and gender sensitive practices to support mental health and well-being in new settings.

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International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

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19

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17

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© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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Human geography

Sociology

Psychology

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Murray, KE; Lenette, C; Brough, M; Reid, K; Correa-Velez, I; Vromans, L; Schweitzer, RD, The Importance of Local and Global Social Ties for the Mental Health and Well-Being of Recently Resettled Refugee-Background Women in Australia, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19 (17), pp. 10917

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