Conference Agenda

For the culture-sensitive further development of a tertiary education in systemic family therapy in Cambodia, a qualitative sequential triangulation study with expert interviews and group discussions was carried out in the Southeast Asian country with local and international mental health professionals.

The research project was committed to the approach of decolonial research, which assumes that Western research ideology goes hand in hand with certain values, biases and practices that influence knowledge production and have been influenced by it. Therefore, a bottom-up approach was preferred, which has its reference in the present cultural context and aims to support local knowledge production. Therefore, following a multidimensional comparative approach, the relevant fields of reference for family therapy in Cambodia were explored and evaluated using a qualitative content analysis method. For the socio-scientific interpretation of intercultural data, the participation of culture-familiar co-interpreters is required, as was done by a Cambodian colleague to check the intercoder agreement. Following the sequential design of the study, relevant aspects from the interview results were used as impulse questions for the group discussions. The results refer to explicit cultural aspects for a Cambodian family therapy and implications for the conception of corresponding trainings.

In Participatory Action Research (PAR), research is used as a medium to engender community action that addresses injustices and promote openness and inclusivity. Despite these advantages, PAR can be time consuming and energy sapping as it requires participants’ involvement from the conceptualization to data analyses and reporting. The fast-moving pace of life in current society makes it difficult for researchers to recruit and maintain participants over a long period. Recognizing the advantages of PAR in community-based research but faced with the potential challenges of recruiting and maintaining research participants in cities of Southern Ontario in Canada, we employed the Structured Interview Matrix (SIM) in our study to explore the psychosocial wellbeing of newcomers to the study areas in the midst of COVID-19. SIM combines features of PAR and FGD to collect and analyze data. Participants are involved in the framing of research questions, interviewing and preliminary analyses of data. SIM is essentially a rapid form of PAR that takes between four to five hours to conduct. In this presentation, we discuss our process and how it was employed as a tool to build social connections among new immigrants from diverse geographical areas of the world in the face of COVID-19.

This presentation will provide an overview of the Suicide First Aid Guidelines I have developed in collaboration with various teams in six Asian countries and for people from migrant and refugee backgrounds, reflecting on the evolution of the mixed-method approach used from the first study carried out 15 years ago to the current methodology. It will then focus on the guidelines developed for community-based sucide prevention for refugee populations and provide the outcomes of an evaluation of an online gatekeepers training offered to humanitarian workers dealing with Internally Displaced children in Syria and conclude with preliminary findings from the currently under development Suicide First Aid Guidelines for Pakistan.

The need to develop suicide prevention strategies and tools through culturally-sensitive and contextually-responsive methodologies will be emphasized and exemplified during the presentation.

Not just since the recent peak of global flight movements in the mid-2010s, professionals in psychosocial work in Europe are required to work with psychologically distressed refugees who have experienced torture and severe violence in their countries of origin and on the flight routes. While there is an everyday professional practice most notably in specialized treatment centers, there has been only few empirical research on the difficulties related to torture experiences of clients in professional work. Most of the literature consists of testimonies and case vignettes. In one of the few empirical studies on emotional reactions and challenges in therapy with Holocaust survivors Danieli (1988) describes therapists’ defensiveness, guilt, anger, shame, threat and an inability to bear the intense feelings.

How do todays professionals experience their professional interactions with torture survivors? How do they deal with torture related professional challenges?

Narrative interviews focusing on the professional interaction according to Riemann (2000) with psychotherapists and social workers who work with clients who have experienced torture offer suitable material for examining the concrete professional action.

A reflexive grounded theory analysis (Breuer et al. 2019) is conducted with the interview material. At the conference first insights into the material will be presented.