Moving Toward Anti-Oppressive Practice with Muslims By Understanding Commonly Used Coping Strategies

Background and Purpose: Understanding the strategies members of a population commonly use deal with challenges, positions practitioners with the cultural knowledge they need to assist clients ameliorate problems (Yi & Kase, in press). As a culturally distinct minority, Muslims experience many challenges in the US (Saleem et al., 2022). Yet little, if anything, is known about how American Muslims cope with the difficulties they encounter. This qualitative study breaks new ground by providing an answer to the following question: how do Muslims cope with the challenges they experience living in US?

Methods: We used a purposive snowball sampling procedure to obtain a national sample of community-dwelling American Muslims (Babbie, 2020). Islamic organizations known to the research team were contacted and subsequently asked if they knew of other organizations that might be interested participating in the study. A link to an online survey was sent to members of participating organizations. This procedure resulted in 22 organizations participating in the study. The mean age of the sample (N=267) was approximately 38 years old (M=38.23, SD=11.74) and a majority of respondents were female, married, college educated, born outside the US, primarily English-speakers at home, and of non-Middle Eastern ethnicity.

In addition to demographic items, the survey included an item to address the study’s research question. After acknowledged that being a Muslim in the US can—at times—be difficult, individuals were asked: “How do you cope with these difficulties? How do you keep from getting (more) depressed, sad, or discouraged?”

Our analysis was informed by a post-positivist epistemological perspective, which guided our interpretive content analysis (Drisko & Maschi, 2016). Specifically, we used a constant comparative methodology in which the data were examined for similarities and patterns (Padgett, 2017). In a recursive process, the emerging themes were compared to similar phenomena across surveys (Corbin & Strauss, 2015). Using Taguette qualitative software, the data were coded, organized into themes, and labeled with descriptive titles.

Results: Analysis identified nine themes, which can be summarized under the following rubrics: 1) Looking to God for support through prayer and other spiritual practices, 2) Seeking support from friends, family and other community members, 3) Engaging in advocacy, 4) Overlooking offensives, 5) Focusing on the positive, 6) Perspective taking, 7) Absence of difficulties, 8) Extreme difficulty coping, and 9) Needing therapy to cope.

Conclusions and Implications: To operationalize anti-oppressive principles in direct practice settings, it is critical to adopt a posture of cultural humility that seeks to understand, and work within, the parameters of clients’ reality. The coping strategies identified in this study aid in this process (Yi & Kase, in press). Developing awareness of the strategies Muslims use, positions future practitioners with the culturally relevant knowledge they need to identify and leverage potential strategies. Practitioners can explore the utility of the various options with clients. If a Muslim is interested in a particular strategy, then practitioners could work with the client to co-construct an intervention with the aim of ameliorating the presently experienced problem.