Research on forced migration from the perspective of the psychology of religion: Opportunities and challenges

Abstract

The goal of our article is to present the subject of forced migration as a very interesting and socially relevant research field that could contribute to further development of the psychology of religion. We focus on further development of the toolbox of the psychology of religion, seeking further application of Sunden’s role theory and introducing new approaches originating from indigenous and environmental psychology. After a short review of existing research, new theoretical approaches, and methodologies are presented, along with suggestions for improving the validity of qualitative research pertaining to the role of religion at all stages of the migration process.

Keywords

Cross-cultural research cultural psychology family refugees religion

Religion and migration represent a huge and rather unmanageable research field. In only 0.63 second a search on Google using these two keywords generates 158,000,000 hits. Narrowing down the scope of the search to forced migration and religion yields 24,000,000 results in 0.41 s. Not only the numbers but also the diversity of academic disciplines contributes to the vastness of the field. Some of them include history, economy, law, demography, anthropology, sociology, and medicine, not to mention area studies and field studies.

In recent years, the growing interest in the topic of the intersection of migration and religion in different fields of academic inquiry has resulted in a great number of publications. Especially in the last decade, after the effects of the Syrian war drove millions of Syrians out of their homes, the books and the articles about topics have proliferated. The wide-ranging collection of articles edited by Beckford (2015) combines the most important contributions to the subject, covering its private, social, and political dimensions published in the last two decades. Another notable work, Intersections of Religion and Migration: Issues at the Global Crossroads, edited by Saunders et al. (2016), addresses the interface between religion and migration in different contexts, ranging from the effects of the migratory experience on religious identity and religious coping to faith-based humanitarianism. Zaman’s (2016) qualitative research, conducted among the Iraqi refugees in Syria, may be of special interest when considering forced migration in the Islamic context.

In their newest edited book, Mavelli and Wilson (2017) provide a wide-scope overview of topics, starting from the politics of religion in the refugee crisis to religious traditions of hospitality. Another highly insightful work (Horstmann & Jung, 2015) has been written from the anthropological perspective, covering both the refugee religious experiences during migration and the religious aspects of humanitarian interventions. Two special issues volumes of the Journal of Refugee Studies, Volume 15, Issue 2, 2002 (Religion and spirituality in forced migration) and Volume 26, Issue 2, 2007 (Refugees and religion), have also been entirely devoted to the research on religion in forced migrants’ experiences.

Psychology contributes to the topic of forced migration through its subdisciplines, such as clinical, cultural, social, community, developmental, and environmental psychology. The list of problems that has been of special interest to psychologists so far includes forced migrants’ acculturation, identities, and mental health (trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)). In our attempt to review the existing literature combining the issues of psychology, religion, and forced migration, we put its findings in the context of the stages of migration.

Role of religion in different stages of forced migration

We understand forced migration as “a migratory movement which, although the drivers can be diverse, involves force, compulsion, or coercion” (International Organization for Migration, 2019, p. 75). Religion plays a role at every stage of forced migrants’ experiences. Not all stages are equally well researched, but all offer an interesting option for new psychological explorations by psychologists of religion.

Departure and journey

Leave taking represents a process when forced migrants—still in their home country—weigh the pros and the cons of their decision to migrate. Contrary to the term forced migrants, by which it is often assumed that migrants are passive victims of circumstances, every migration requires a decision-making process. For the forced migrants, the category of insecurity (Trinka, 2019) becomes central in the decision-making process, and the religious worldviews affect the way that they deal with insecurity and how they define the threshold of unbearable circumstances.

Religion can provide arguments for both staying and leaving. Our research among Syrian forced migrants in Turkey provides numerous examples of people who have chosen to stay and have accepted the war in Syria as their God-willed destiny. Staying can also be perceived as a religious duty to provide help to the members of the community.

At the psychosocial level, belonging to a threatened religious group may be a direct reason for making the decision to leave as in the case of Christians, Ismailis, and Yazidis in Syria and Iraq (Tan, 2017) or of Hazara and other Shiites in Afghanistan (Rasuly-Paleczek, 2017). It is worth mentioning that belonging to a majority whose leaders oppress other groups can also be a factor for leave taking because of the refusal to support the religion-based divide of the nation (Hackl, 2017).

The second stage of migration pertains to the actual journey to the destination country. Religion is credited for helping migrants cope with hardships and perils (Dorais, 2007; Hamood, 2006; Khawaja et al., 2008), for spiritual transformation induced by the exposure to liminal conditions during the flight, and finally, for finding meaning in being exiles or migrants (DeMarinis, 2013; Matos et al., 2018). Religion also affects the trajectories of the encounters with various kinds of assistance (some of them religiously based) along the escape route.

Arrival and post-arrival

The third stage represents the settlement process in the destination country where religious communities offer various kinds of services, aimed at fostering social inclusion of forced migrants (Beaman et al., 2017). However, the religion of migrants, especially when different from that of the destination country, stimulates fear or “moral panic” and operates in the process of “selfing” and “othering.” Religion often becomes simplistically perceived as the main characteristic of migrants even if it was not the most important identity in their home communities (e.g. “cultural Muslims” in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Syria), while other characteristics, such as education, profession, age on arrival, or place of origin, are disregarded, contributing to the process of “de-selving” of a refugee, understood as “a gradual erosion of agency imposed on refugees by organizational, legal and social context in the destination country” (Hajdukowski-Ahmed, 2009). In some cases, the “othering” of migrants takes the form of accepting their own mores, which are in sharp contrast to the culture of the destination country. Unni Wikan (2002) describes the situation in Norway, where the conviction that ‘this is their culture’ allows a couple of practices (child marriages and female circumcision) in migrant families that would never be accepted in the dominant culture. From the newcomers’ psychological perspective, after their arrival and initial relief, which may be manifested in their sense of thankfulness to God, a new kind of stress develops—related to acculturation processes and other problems faced in the destination country, specifically economic hardship, discrimination, and the general sense of disappointment (Oktem, 2019). The positive role of religious coping in the psychological wellbeing of forced migrants after their resettlement has been confirmed by a series of case studies (Brune et al., 2002; Darychuk & Jackson, 2015; El-Khani et al., 2017; Hasan et al., 2018; Mayer, 2007; McMichael, 2002; Pahud et al., 2009; Shaw et al., 2019; Sleijpen et al., 2016). Goździak (2002, 2009) presents the practical implications of religious coping and religiously based indigenous healing methods.

Arrival—response of welcoming communities

The last step of the migration process is the response of a welcoming community, which starts even before the migrants’ arrival to their desired destination. As Carrière (2017) rightly observes, “To welcome a refugee and to hold out one’s hand to a person who has just disembarked are the first moves towards establishing a relationship and beginning to build community” (p. 150).

Religion also pertains to the situation of forced migrants in the destination country with respect to the humanitarian assistance offered by secular and religious organizations. Secular organizations are perceived (especially by state-run sponsoring agencies) as more trusted, basing their activities on universal human rights, while religious organizations are viewed with a certain degree of suspicion as not objective enough, combining humanitarian assistance with proselytizing efforts. Paradoxically, faith-based organizations sometimes even need to hide their religious profiles to be considered “good enough” to offer sponsorship despite their religious backgrounds. At the same time, local members of faith-based organizations are often real field workers, who perform tasks that are officially financed by secular foundations. During the first author’s field work in Jordan, it was possible to organize a computer literacy course (sponsored by a secular organization) for young Syrian girls only because the recruiter was a Muslim woman from a humanitarian religious non-governmental organization (NGO), and in the parents’ perception, she was trustworthy enough so that they let their daughters participate in the course conducted outside the settlement.

However, it does not mean that any organization, whether religious or secular, should be accepted without careful consideration. For example, the Wahabi mission in the Polish refugee reception centers aimed at recruiting young Muslim men, mostly Chechen, to fight in the Middle East and was therefore banned from its activities by the local Chechen community.

Toolbox of the psychology of religion in the research on forced migration

From its inception, the psychology of religion has been interested in the topics that could be explored in the research among forced migrants, especially religious experience, conversion and deconversion, and the role of religion in mental health and mental pathology. In this section, we present the ways of enlarging the pool of topics, as well as the theoretical and the empirical approaches.

Theoretical approaches: old and new

An important input in the study on religious experience has been brought by Sunden’s (1966) role taking theory, which points to the fact that an unusual, difficult situation, exceeding the limits of being resolved by an individual, evokes an attempt to understand it within the framework of the religious tradition familiar to the person. Two simultaneous processes occur. A person assumes the role of a human subject, as described in a well-known religious script, and adopts the role of God, that is, anticipates God’s action toward himself/herself as analogical to that described in his or her religious tradition. The person’s religious reference system and acquaintance with religious texts structure his or her perception of both roles. A person experiences his or her situation as God’s plan. Although Sunden’s (1966) role theory has been developed in the Christian context and applied to it by Sunden’s followers in Scandinavian universities (Holm & Belzen, 1995; Källstad, 1987; Petterson, 1975; Unger, 1976; Wikström, 1987), it could also be fruitfully applied to interpreting reactions of forced migrants in their current situation.

Indigenous psychology and environmental psychology are theoretical approaches that could significantly contribute to further development of the psychology of religion and to the research on the role of religion in forced migration. Organizational efforts (publications followed by organized congresses) to start indigenous psychology have been made by Korean psychologist Uichol Kim (Kim et al., 2006), who points to the fact that the applicability of psychological terms and theories developed in the West is somewhat limited by the scope of their culture of origin. Therefore, they are not universal, and there is no reason to call them culturally independent. Fiske (2002) also states, “We [Western psychology] must transcend our ethnocentric framework and not just study how other cultures differ from the United States but explore what they are intrinsical” (p. 87). Following Fiske’s statement, one might venture to say that in fact, Western psychology is the indigenous psychology of Western people, which pretends to be universal. Examples of culture-specific concepts from outside Europe include the indigenous concept of justice as it operates in China, the Japanese concept of amae which means behavior seeking closeness with other person through building parent-child type of relationship (Kim et al., 2006), or the two-levels-of-truth approach to harmony maintenance in China, which makes it possible to conform to conventions in one’s outer, public reality, while remaining a non-conformist in one’s inner reality (Sundararajan, 2015).

Environmental psychology has developed a discussion on the role of a place and its religious dimension. It builds on the concept of place attachment (Grzymała-Moszczyńska & Trąbka, 2014), which is seldom studied by psychologists (Lewicka, 2008, 2011). However, it is a frequently discussed subject by anthropologists of religion (e.g. Knott, 2005; Tweed, 2006). Our intention is to point to the paucity of research on the subject from a psychological perspective. This new approach brings specific, spatial, material, and geographical contexts into the analysis. As Counted and Zock (2019) point out,

attachment to a geographic place could have a spiritual significance for religious believers, depending on the psychological needs that are stimulated by their environment. This spiritual significance enables them to make sense of life events, relationships and the self, as they interact with the objects of attachment. (p. 19, italics in original text)

Forced migration research as a context for such an approach is of particular relevance here because of the highly significant experience of displacement of migrants, who have not only lost their homes but also their burial places and temples that are containers of individual and group memories (Fullilove, 1996).

Topics for research: old and new

Another important topic that can be found in the narratives of refugees comprises conversion and deconversion. In the research among Syrian urban refugees in Istanbul, conducted by the first author as part of a larger project (Cetrez & DeMarinis, 2017), the respondents reflected on all atrocities of the war that they experienced in their home country. Their suffering has brought some of them to an open renouncement of God’s existence, and they declare themselves as atheists. Further analysis of this topic, especially the personal dynamics that make people either abandon or keep their religious involvement despite the war or flight-induced traumas, make the topic very important. The methodological problems with assessing the changing religiosity of forced migrants are discussed in detail by Trinka (2019).

The phases of migration are separated by the distance in time and location, but psychological reactions have a certain continuity; they are fluid and cumulative when people face acculturation problems. This cumulative nature of migratory stress results in its intersectionality and makes it a very complex phenomenon. Possible stressors and their importance must not be assumed as taken for granted by a researcher or a therapist because they are culturally (Chun et al., 2006; Kuo, 2011) and historically determined (e.g. the historical past may co-create the refugee trauma, as in the case of Assyrian-Syrian refugees living in a transit reality in Istanbul, for whom the memory of Sayfo, transmitted through generations, Cetrez, 2017), is revived by the new experience of flight from war-torn Syria. Psychologists of religion can contribute to understanding the role of religion in shaping the entirety of the coping process of forced migrants (e.g. defining and prioritizing stressors and understanding religious communities’ trauma in the historical context).

Mental health practitioners have the widely accepted consensus that a purely medical model of intervention is not efficient in the context of complex emergencies. There is a situational overlap of symptoms of migrants with temporary psychosocial and behavioral problems and those who have severe psychological reactions to war-related prolonged trauma. However, the complaints presented in those suffering from only temporary psychosocial problems generally differ in degree and often demonstrate a greater ability to cope and adapt. For this population, when their culture and community cohesiveness generally determine how war, trauma, and displacement are experienced and coped with, a programmatic emphasis can be placed on community-based programs that focus on “strengthening family and kinship ties, promoting indigenous healing methods, facilitating community participation in decision-making, fostering leadership structures, and re-establishing spiritual, religious, social, and cultural institutions and practices that restore a framework of cohesion and purpose for the whole community” (John Hopkins University and International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 2008, p. 216, based on Silove, 1999).

In recent years, the psychosocial model has gained the status of a recommended way of intervention in the communities affected by disasters. This approach opens the possibility for the psychologists of religion to inform humanitarian aid practitioners about the role of religion in psychosocial processes of recovery. For example, religion plays a vital role in the pillars of the Adaptation and Development after Persecution and Trauma (ADAPT) model introduced by Derek Silove (2013). Psychologists of religion should ask how religion is intertwined in the ADAPT pillars and contributes to its practical applications in different cultural and religious contexts.

The medicalization of suffering in Western psychology (Summerfield, 2008) has overshadowed the different understandings of suffering in other religious-cultural contexts. The psychologists of religion can contribute to the more religion-sensitive psychiatric and psychological therapies for forced migrants by pointing to the necessity of identifying the indigenous coping models in the migrants’ religious traditions.

Here, the experience of cultural psychiatrists can be a very useful example for psychologists of religion. For instance, Hassan et al.’s (2016) team report about Syrians’ psychosocial wellbeing presents the understanding of suffering and the construction of the self in Islamic culture. It is also important to include the findings of indigenous psychologies, including those concerning religion, in designing refugee therapies (Al-Karam, 2018).

As forced migration poses a great challenge for existential meaning, the relation between religion and meaning-making processes in the forced migrant population is another subject that may be explored by the psychologists of religion.

Validity of qualitative research on forced migration and religion

The development of the psychology of religion as a discipline depends on the quality of the research in the field. There are many reservations about moving beyond a largely quantitative approach, which dominates the field at the moment, originating from the fact that qualitative research produces results of limited validity and generalization. In the following paragraphs, we suggest some remedies to both obstacles in the development of the initial version of this subject section in another article (Anczyk et al., 2019).

Johnson (1997) has specified several types of validity that qualitative researchers should follow (p. 283). Three types are of particular relevance here. The first is descriptive validity, which means considering the degree of accuracy of the reports about people’s behaviors and the context in which a given behavior occurs. A researcher from outside the culture and the religion presented by his or her sample might very easily fall into the trap of assuming the meaning of an observed behavior via his or her own cultural lens. To avoid such a mistake, not only the investigator’s knowledge of culture and religion is important but also his or her triangulation, defined as the “use of multiple observers to record and describe the research participants’ behaviour and the context in which they are located” (Johnson, 1997, p. 285). Ideally, at least some investigators included in the triangulation should have the same background as that of the participants.

The second consideration is interpretive validity, that is, “the researcher’s ability to accurately understand the meanings of the participants’ statements and behaviors. A qualitative researcher can understand things from the participants’ perspectives and provide a valid account of these perspectives” (Johnson, 1997, p. 285). It might be a very challenging step. It requires returning to the research group after some time and engaging the participants in a second round of conversation about the accuracy of what was understood and written down by the researcher. In the case of forced migrants, not only time constraints limit this possibility but also the respondents’ decreased ability to once more process the painful, difficult stories they previously shared. In addition, many of them are “people on the move,” not residing anymore in their previous location. To some extent, such obstacles could be overcome by directly quoting the participants’ words in the research report. It makes their answers directly available to the reader without any interpretive filter employed by the researcher. It also allows checking how the participants’ statements are interpreted and generalized at a later stage of the study. The researcher’s good command of the respondents’ language increases his or her ability to understand precisely what they say. However, an interpreter’s help is often necessary in conducting an interview. It is vital for the interpreter to understand the importance of a detailed translation, without summarizing, censoring, or correcting what is said.

The third consideration pertains to the interpretation of the collected data from a theoretical perspective, helping the researcher understand how and why a certain phenomenon operates. This theoretical validity of the qualitative research concerns the “degree that a theoretical explanation developed from a research study fits the data, and therefore is credible and defensible” (Johnson, 1997, p. 286). For example, the forced migrants’ pattern of narratives about their flight as “God’s will” might be explained by Sunden’s (1966) theory if the stories shared by the participants include references to sacred scripts from their respective religious traditions. To be able to trace such a pattern, extended fieldwork is needed. It is not enough to single out an interview containing such a statement, but the pattern should be observed in different groups of forced migrants. Not only the scope of the fieldwork but also the attempt to examine the same phenomenon from the perspectives of different theories (theory triangulation), as well as the inclusion of additional researchers (investigator triangulation), will contribute to the theoretical validity of the interpretation of the acquired results.

Johnson (1997) also indicates the requirements that need to be fulfilled by a given research report in order to provide an opportunity for their eventual generalization, as follows:

The number and kinds of people in the study, how they were selected to be in the study, contextual information, the nature of the researcher’s relationship with the participants, information about any informants who provided information, the methods of data collection used, and the data analysis techniques used. (p. 290 italics for emphasis)

Before delving into the details of psychological research, a researcher needs to admit that participation in such research is not neutral for some non-Western participants. On the contrary, it creates a challenge in the research involving forced migrants. It is connected with the respondents’ fear of the possibility of being stigmatized as individuals who experience serious mental problems and therefore need to consult a psychologist.

Sampling

A great deal of research has been conducted in the groups of forced migrants who are already settled in the destination country, sometimes even including their children, which puts the second generation in the same category as their parents. Therefore, their experience usually pertains to the third stage of the migratory process. There is a paucity of psychological research on the first or the second stage of the migratory process. To the best of our knowledge, no psychological research has specifically described the role of religion in leave taking and journeying (even though some information on the subject can be found in more general works, as listed above). This problem is related to the limited sampling issue—the majority of the research on forced migration has been conducted in Western developed countries rather than in the developing countries where the overwhelming majority (80%, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)) of forced migrants live.

Oftentimes, the characteristics of the research sample provided in the research reports are very general, without consideration for internal differences, for example, Shia and Sunni Muslims and refugees from Iran and Syria are jointly described as Muslim refugees. Syrian refugees in Hatay (on the Turkish border with Syria) and Syrian refugees in Berlin are also blended in one category even if the first cohort consists mainly of poor families of farmers and construction workers whose skills are not in professional fields while the second cohort comprises young men with professional qualifications often in information technology. Combining them under the single label of “Syrian refugees” brings multiple confusions. These examples illustrate the importance of detailed descriptions of who is studied and where the research is conducted.

The method of selecting the participants creates another challenge. Snowballing (a seed person recommends to the researcher the next participant sharing the same characteristic) is the most common strategy in qualitative research, while convenience sampling is typical in quantitative research (questionnaires distributed to all students of a certain ethnic background in school or to all members of an ethnic organization). The qualitative researchers’ anti-positivist inclination sometimes leads to disregarding the importance of describing the sampling procedures, which creates problems with reliability and replicability (Omona, 2013).

Another problem that should receive attention is the question of the researcher’s positionality and reflexivity. The nature of the researcher’s relationship with the participants has implications for who can possibly be studied and how trustworthy the researcher is. The second author conducted her interviews with Syrian women in Iskenderun. As an Arabic language speaker, mother of two children, and locally grounded by her husband’s family, she has not only been allowed to contact the respondents in the absence of their husbands but has also been trusted as a mother who can understand the experiences of other women/mothers. The same research with refugee women, conducted by a young man who needs a translator’s help, would be limited—if possible at all—not only by the need for the presence of each participant’s husband and the additional presence of a translator, but also quite likely by the restricted participation of the woman herself in the interview. Even if she is physically present, it may happen that more answers will be offered by the husband on behalf of his wife. Carp (2011) and Harvey (2011) have discussed the researcher’s actual gender and body as tools and contexts for conducting research.

Methodologies

A significant part of the psychological research on religion in the forced migrant population has been conducted by means of scales and questionnaires translated from English to the language of the respondents. Translations often have crucial weaknesses due to the lack of “religious literacy” and training among psychologists of religion in faith traditions other than their own Christian tradition. The questionnaire items are neither culturally nor religiously neutral (statements such as “When I pray, I feel like I am talking to God” or “I have a personal relationship with God” may sound blasphemous to a Muslim person). A solution for the situation might be the early inclusion of cultural and religious peculiarities in the development of methodological instruments. There are some good examples of including the cultural-religious context in a scale’s construction, as demonstrated by Ağılkaya-Şahin (2019). The author has shown how Al-Ghazali’s (11th-century mystic) writings about different kinds of individual religiosity could be used in building a culturally adequate scale of religiosity applied to the contemporary Turkish population. It seems reasonable to suggest that scholars of religious studies, with their knowledge of different religious traditions, can support psychological studies on religion in forced migrant populations. All these mentioned standardized scales and questionnaires should not and could not be eliminated, especially from clinical practice in different cultural populations. However extra caution is needed in adapting these instruments to different religious contexts. The mixed-method model design offers good practice in this respect. The first step consists of interviews pertaining to a given context and conducted with members of the culture in question, as well as a joint discussion with indigenous scholars about a possible re-construction/adaptation of the Western scales and questionnaires (Al-Karam, 2018; Hwang, 2017; Rothman & Coyle, 2018). In other words, as postulated by Adair et al. (1993), psychologists need to ensure that “concepts, problems, hypothesis, methods, and tests emanate from, adequately represent, and reflect upon the cultural context in which the behaviour is observed” (p. 149). Only after assuring the cultural correctness of the measure could the second stage of the research (the distribution of the questionnaire among the research participants) take place.

The empirical indicators of religiosity should also be carefully selected (e.g. in some countries, wearing a veil might not indicate a woman’s particular level of religious involvement but a family tradition).

While describing the research context, a researcher also needs to include information about the sources of data (other than the participants) concerning the studied problem, be it the media in general and social media in particular or local organizations, religious or otherwise, not only those offering help but also those fighting against such groups of participants. For the researcher, the collected information creates the context for further interpreting the data from forced migrants and needs to be accounted for by presenting it in the description of the research.

Psychologists of religion could also employ other methodologies, such as action research and the standpoint methodology. Both of them switch the “point of gravity” in making the decision about what to study from the external researcher to the research participants, who are involved in deciding on and formulating the detailed research question, as well as in discussing the obtained results. This approach is an attempt to give a voice and agency to the marginalized groups and allow them to challenge the dominant position of the receiving society, as well as contribute to solving the real problems they experience (Balakrishnan & Claiborne, 2017; Goodson & Grzymala-Kazlowska, 2017; Sprague, 2005).

Conclusion

To sum up, we observe an increased interest in forced migration, perceived in all its complexity, as an opportunity for the development of the psychology of religion. In terms of methodology, using the above-mentioned strategies in qualitative research will allow the design of new measures and instruments or the refinement of existing ones in quantitative and clinical research. We also believe that further collaboration with indigenous psychologies (e.g. Islamic psychology, Buddhist psychology) can be very fruitful for practical applications of the psychology of religion in the context of the psychological wellbeing of forced migrants.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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