Linking Individual and Community Resilience in Refugees' Recovery from Alcohol Use
Within social work research and practice resilience has traditionally been conceptualized at the individual level. Only recently have scholars begun to explore and understand the ways in which communities or cultures are resilient after adversity (Chandler & Lalonde, 2008). This is especially salient in research and practice with refugees wherein entire communities and cultural groups have experienced trauma. Refugees who are displaced due to political conflict often experience a range of traumatic and stressful events throughout displacement and resettlement including exposure to traumatic events such as imprisonment or gender-based violence, protracted periods of time in refugee camps and resettlement related stress. Refugee communities may also experience a disruption in or loss of culture and cultural structures. For example, conflict and displacement may prevent refugee families and communities from performing important cultural events such as weddings or funerals; may disrupt social bonds through separation; and may disrupt the transmission of cultural knowledge through stories, songs or music. These experiences can contribute to increased levels of alcohol consumption and an increase in negative consequences of alcohol use in communities displaced by political conflict. Recent research indicates that enhancing community and cultural resilience can help refugees to heal (Doron, 2005). This study contributes to the discourse about community and cultural resilience by using a community resilience framework to understand refugees’ experiences with quitting alcohol use after conflict and displacement.
Methods
In this qualitative study that drew from critical ethnographic and phenomenological methodologies, individual and group interviews were conducted with 62 participants in a Karen refugee community in St. Paul, MN and in refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border. This specific paper draws on data from a sub-sample of 10 participants who identified as being in recovery from alcohol for at least 30 days or longer. Resulting data were analyzed using Spradley’s (1979) domain analysis.
Results
Themes emerged from the data to suggest that the loss or disruption of cultural structures and patterns caused by conflict and displacement directly contributed to elevated levels of problematic alcohol consumption and co-occurring violence. Participants identified an explicit connection between individual resilience, cultural resilience and recovery, indicating that one could not happen without the others. Karen participants described people with problematic alcohol use as people who had stopped thinking about community and family and had begun to think only of themselves. Consequently, re-focusing on family, community and culture were essential parts of the process toward quitting alcohol use.
Conclusions and Implications
Only recently has thinking about resilience shifted from a focus on individual psychological resilience to consider cultural or community-level resilience. Findings from this study indicate a need to further consider the ways in which individual resilience and community/cultural resilience interact and are dependent upon each other. The results of this study are used to contribute to a deeper understanding of community or cultural resilience and to the development of recovery models that leverage the interaction between individual and cultural resilience.