The Relational Home: Factors Associated with Feeling at Home Among Stateless Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh

Background and Purpose: The Rohingya, a stateless and minoritized ethnic group from Burma, have been identified by the United Nations as the most persecuted group globally. This population has been forcibly displaced due to an ethnic cleansing campaign by the military government of Burma in August 2017. Today, it is estimated that 957,971 of the approximately 1.1 million Rohingya refugees who were forcibly displaced are temporarily sheltered in Cox’s Bazar, where they remain exiled from their ancestral home. This study aimed to identify factors associated with feeling at home among Rohingya refugees living in these camps to provide a more nuanced understanding of the complex factors that support refugee well-being during protracted exile. The research question guided the study: What factors among stateless Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, are associated with feeling at home?

Method: Using a conceptual framework outlining four typologies of home, we compared four logistic regression models for their goodness of fit. The secondary data used in the study comes from the 2019 data collection for The Rohingya Survey (Xchange Foundation), a cross-sectional survey administered by four Rohingya enumerators over three weeks (March through April 2019), which included 1,277 participants. Participants were adult Rohingya refugees who arrived in Cox’s Bazar after the August 2017 military operation in northern Rakhine State, Burma, and lived in the refugee settlements in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, at the time of the survey. Model-building methods included fitting a model with variables meeting inclusion criteria from bivariate analysis, forward stepwise logistic regression, backward stepwise logistic regression, and variable selection by intersection. The Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) were used to assess the goodness of fit across models. The authors of this study included a resettled Rohingya refugee living in the United States, who provided an emic perspective of the study’s findings.

Results: The intersected model, Model 4, provided the best fit for the data, with lower AIC indicating that the model strikes a better balance between goodness of fit and model complexity, while the lower BIC suggested that the model provided a good fit for the data without overfitting or including unnecessary variables. Model 4 indicated that Rohingya who reported higher satisfaction with social support were 186% more likely to feel at home in the camp (AOR = 1.86, 95% CI = 1.45, 2.40). Those who found talking about their daily problems helpful were almost five times more likely to report feeling at home (AOR = 4.97, 95% CI = 2.13, 11.60).

Conclusions and Implications: The study’s findings suggest that social support and communication are critical in promoting a sense of home among Rohingya refugees. Social workers in resettlement countries can prioritize developing social support systems that provide opportunities for refugees to connect with others to foster a sense of community and promote healing as a collective process. Moreover, they can create relational spaces that allow refugees to engage in activities that reflect their cultural and social contexts, promoting attachment to their new homes as a relational space.