What makes you think that? Gender Role Attitudes of Young Refugees in Germany and their Associations with Age, Gender, and Country of Origin

During 2015 and 2016 more people applied for asylum in Germany than in any other year since World War II, in 2015 31% of them younger than 18 years. Since then, many discussions focus on the successful adaption of those adolescent refugees to the German society. In cross-cultural psychology the concept of acculturation is used to explain adaption to new cultural settings by stating that individuals with ongoing contact to members of another culture will use different strategies to handle differences in values, norms, and behaviors. Accordingly, depending on their orientation towards the culture of origin or the culture of the host country, refugees choose, for example to adopt or reject a value from the other culture, with the additional possibility of combining or rejecting both. This process of acculturation is associated with characteristics of the surrounding cultures and the individual person. In contrast, public debates often focus on the differences between values as hindrance for a successful adaption. These discussions often lack empirical data on the actual values held by refugees and neglect to consider the heterogeneity of the population of refugees. Therefore, the aim of this study is to shed light on the orientation towards their culture of origin and host culture of n = 102 adolescents (MAge= 14.52 years, SDAge = 1.89) who arrived in Germany as refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, or Iraq and their association with their gender role attitudes. Gender Role Attitudes were chosen because they are among the values frequently mentioned in public debates. Multiple regression models were computed to investigate possible associations between age, gender, length of stay, country of origin, and acculturation orientation of adolescents with a refugee background and their attitudes towards gender roles to gain insight into factors associated with the gender role attitudes held by adolescent refugees in Germany.