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Although refugees who are accepted for resettlement in a third country are guaranteed certain rights and experience safety from war and persecution, they face many mental health challenges. Using qualitative methods and constructivist grounded theory, we explored culturally specific perspectives on trauma and recovery among Burundian, Congolese, and Iraqi refugees resettled in the USA. Eighteen semi-structured interviews provided extensive data on the meaning of productivity and work, the ways in which they index normalcy and self-sufficiency, and how they create security that facilitates the healing process. Our inductive analyses revealed that participants emphasized the relationship between productivity and healing when they described recovery from trauma. Participants also discussed individual and structural facilitators and barriers to work. Finally, prominent themes emerged around gendered roles and expectations and the ways these function in refugee resettlement contexts that are shaped by policies that demand rapid economic self-sufficiency. Taken together, these findings suggest that policies that promote underemployment and foreclose opportunities for education and professional development may contribute negatively to refugee mental health, as well as keep refugees in poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. war with Iraq led to the displacement of millions of Iraqis, many of whom have resettled in the United States as refugees. We explore the challenges Iraqi families face after resettlement, with a particular focus on the agency of refugees and challenges/opportunities of familial social reproduction in a transnational context. We conducted 181 qualitative interviews with 38 Iraqis (11 youth, 27 adults) and 5 service providers. Our findings highlight the importance of exploring refugee agency and illuminate how the interplay between structure and agency in transnational contexts is a useful framework for understanding transformations around social roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social and geographic displacement is a global phenomenon that precipitates novel stressors and disruptions that intersect with long-standing familial and social roles. Among the displaced are war-tom Iraqi refugee families, who must address these new obstacles in unconventional ways. This study explores how such disruptions have influenced associations between gender and apparent self-worth experienced by Iraqi refugee families upon relocation to the USA. Further, the psychosocial mechanisms requisite of any novel approach to a new social constmct are explored and reveal that production in the family is at the core of instability and shifting power dynamics during resettlement, preventing family members from "seeing the life" in the USA that they had envisioned prior to immigration. Over 200 semi-structured qualitative interviews with Iraqi participants and mental health providers were conducted over the course of the study, which demonstrate a plasticity among social roles in the family and community that transcends the notion of a simple role reversal, and illustrate the complex positionalities that families under stress must approximate during such physical and social displacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]