Impact of Daily Stressors on Psychological Distress: A Sri Lankan Tamil Refugee Analysis

The objective of this study was to examine whether post-migration stressors mediate the relationship between pre-migration trauma and refugee psychological distress, regardless of host country status. Sri Lankan refugees living in Canada and India (n=83) were surveyed using the Harvard Trauma Questi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The International journal of interdisciplinary social and community studies (Print) 2015, Vol.11 (1), p.1-16
Main Authors: Jettner, Jennifer, George, Miriam
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Migration
Psychological distress
Psychological trauma
Refugees
Stress
Tamil people
Trauma
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Summary:The objective of this study was to examine whether post-migration stressors mediate the relationship between pre-migration trauma and refugee psychological distress, regardless of host country status. Sri Lankan refugees living in Canada and India (n=83) were surveyed using the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire, the Post-Migration Living Difficulties Checklist, and the Symptoms Check List. Results indicate that the relationship between pre-migration trauma and psychological distress was partially mediated by post-migration stressors (b=1.03, 95% BCa CI (.18 2.5) and increased variance explained from 15.4% to 19.9% when included in the final model, while controlling for host country. The direct relationship between pre-migration trauma and psychological distress reduced, but remained significant (b=3.30, 95% BCa CI (.64, 5.95)). Implication for practice is that the failure to include post-migration stressors in explanatory models of distress will overestimate the predictive power of war exposure, and will overlook variance in refugee distress.
ISSN:2324-7576
2324-7584
DOI:10.18848/2324-7576/CGP/v11i01/53460