Shoptalk: Fulbright Research -- Ethics and Logistics of Planning Research with Refugee Children

December 18, 2010

Come January, my community partner, Harvest Centre, and I will start Phase 1 of our research. Phase 1 is determining the mental health needs and behavioral issues of the 185 refugee children at Harvest Centre school. Phase 2 is the developing a teacher training program to manage those refugee mental health and behavioral issues in the class.

Harvest Centre was ready to jump right in and start the research the next day, back in November. What a wonderful reversal of roles to have a community partner who’s ready to make a project happen before I am! I couldn’t start right away because I had to (1) Get ethics review board approval from HELP University and (2) Put a research team in place beforehand.

I was working on the ethics review application right up until the last minute, before the Department’s Christmas party. I’d previously had a couple meetings with the head Ethics Review professors, Winnie and Hera, because of the sticky issues surrounding refugee child research. Namely, it is very difficult to get proper parent consent for us to collect information on their children. The refugee kids often don’t live with their parents and their guardians/parents don’t know how to read English. And, the parents almost never come into the school so it’s impossible to get the one-on-one, well-explained verbal and written consent we got back with immigrant parents in Brooklyn schools. Winnie and Hera often use passive consent which involves sending consent forms home with the children and if the parents do not return the consent forms saying NO, then we assume passive agreement from the parents for their children to participate in the study. This is frowned upon back in NYC, although I think it’s used elsewhere in the U.S. Tricky issue, but I feel that I have no choice but to use passive consent, since we can’t get in live contact with the parents. See photo above for a parent who came into another school, the Rohingya Muslim refugee school, to talk with the Malay Muslim teacher of her refugee child.

So, I was relieved to get the consent forms, copies of the measures, and the ethics application done just in time, before I leave town, so my approval should be in place by the team I return in January, ready to interview the refugee teachers about the children’s mental health.

I now have a research lab coordinator and large cadre of interested research assistants from HELP University, since they all want research experience. All these students want to work on this project because it’s the only project at HELP involving low-income children, and refugees are of interest for many of these undergrads.

The plan is for these undergrads to do the interviewing of the refugee teachers. And, some undergrads will enter the data. Also, another HELP professor who specializes in qualitative focus groups, named Anasuya, has offered to run the focus groups with the teachers to get their input on what effective strategies for refugee classroom management we should include in the teacher training manual. Four of the clinical psychology graduate students have also committed to do one-on-one therapy with the refugee children at Harvest Centre and help with the mental health assessments.

Then, we’ll use all the mental health issue and teacher input to adapt an existing teacher training program, called “TeacherCorps,” I worked on at NYU for the refugee classrooms. The plan is to try out the training program on a bunch of refugee teachers from other schools, using our adapted teacher training manual. I can then leave the manual with Harvest Centre and they’ll add this classroom behavior management training to all their existing academic trainings they do with teachers every year. I like this goal of sustainability, after I leave.