How Marginalized Bedouin Youth Self-Define Their Salutogenic Coping within the Context of Cultural Marginalization, Violence, and Deep Poverty: An Arts-Based Research Study

Background. The goal of this presentation is to describe the self-defined stressors and salutogenic coping mechanisms of a group of indigenous Bedouin youth dealing with deep poverty, social marginalization, and political conflict with the hegemonic society in Israel. This helps to re-frame sense of coherence as a culturally constructed element that can be better understood within a specific socio-cultural context. The additional objective is to show how arts-based methods can help co-produce knowledge about stress and, most importantly, about salutogenic coping which includes meaning, manageability, and comprehensibility for marginalized non-Western youth.

            Methods. Methods include the use of arts-based research as an embodied, but also socially embedded, method of research that enables the situating of these ongoing stress situations within the specific social context of the youth. Fifty drawings by young Bedouins of ‘a good day that went bad and how I fixed it’ were used. Through transforming the bad day images, levels of meaning, manageability, and comprehensibility were found. The themes of coping were then further developed in focus groups with the youth based on these images.

            Results. The findings show that the two central stressors for the youth were managing intense home-versus-school responsibilities and managing their harsh and impoverished environment. While their sense of coherence could be understood as a passive lack of coping, within the specific socio-cultural reality of their stress situations, they were effective ways of managing, understanding, and giving meaning to these situations.

            Conclusions and Applications. The arts-based research as method helped to reveal how sense of coherence was manifested in different ways from within Western culture in relation to the background or context of their cultural reality. The methods thus produced new knowledge about how marginalized youth cope. This has direct implications for practitioners and policy makers. The methodology has relevance for all people researching marginalized youth.