Long-term well-being of Palestinian Youth project funded by the Jacobs Foundation
Brian Barber, director of the Center for the Study of Youth and Political Violence at the University of Tennessee, and CPC Learning Network Global Technical Group convener, has received a $1 million grant from the Jacobs Foundation of Switzerland to study the long-term well-being of Palestinian youth.
The project will allow Barber to build on the intensive work he did in the 1990s with adolescents and youth emerging from the first Intifada. He will study the cohort now that they are adults.
“The basic question that we’re trying to answer is, ‘What is the impact of political conflict on youth as they transition to adulthood?’” said Barber, a professor of child and family studies, who is a leading expert on youth who experience political conflict and Palestinian youth in particular.
“The question is compelling for two reasons. First, the population of young people who experience political conflict is substantial and therefore deserves pointed attention. Second, existing research has not adequately answered the question of impact, leaving us still unable to confidently recommend policies or intervention strategies.”
The research team, which will consult regularly with members of the CPC Learning Network in oPt, will focus on Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
“Palestinians have been selected for this initial project because of several unique elements of their experience,” Barber said. Palestinian adolescents — more than any other youth population — have had extraordinarily high involvement in political conflict. The conflict in their homeland has been going on throughout their young adulthood, and is complicated by the recent factional divide among Palestinians themselves.
“The proposed project would be the first-ever, representative and comprehensive follow-up of a cohort of youth who participated substantially in political conflict during their adolescence and young adulthood, and periodically thereafter,” he said.
Barber plans to interview 2,000 males and females who were ages 7 to 17 in 1987 when the first Palestinian uprising against Israel began.
The project will help to refine an innovative method for doing longitudinal research on crisis-affected populations. Using a life-event history calendaring method, it will examine patterns of education, employment and key social relationships, including marriage and children. Barber said he’ll focus particularly on how war and violence has impacted their economic resources (e.g., food, shelter, electricity, mobility), social resources (e.g., loss of parents, siblings, extended family members, friends and respected leaders), and political resources.
“We’ll identify the various pathways the subjects have taken since their early experiences with political conflict, and can specifically assess how patterns of loss, and loss recovery, over time predict their current well-being in the major areas of their lives,” Barber said.
Then, the researchers will choose 500 of the adults who represent those key trajectories and record life history interviews with them, using the life-event history calendar as the prompt.
“It is one thing to know the factual patterns of events or experiences; it is quite another to know what those moments meant to the youth and how critical they were or were not in their development,” Barber said.
The central hypothesis of the project is that the loss, particularly the repeated loss, of key resources will be more useful in predicting overall functioning than merely the exposure to violence that most other studies concentrate on. The hope, he said, is that this research will help better identify those whose lives have been seriously compromised through experiences with conflict, and those who have adapted effectively. For both cases, he said, the data will help determine the key factors that have contributed to their current state of well-being. These findings will assist significantly in developing programs and recommending policies for current youth undergoing protracted political conflict.
Findings from the research will be applicable to the thousands of young people worldwide who experience war and violence associated with political conflict, and the methodology will serve as a template for doing similar research in other conflict regions.
The project will culminate with three dissemination seminars — to be held in Jerusalem, Washington, D.C., and Zurich — where the findings will be discussed and implications for policy and practice will be identified.
The research team will include Center colleague Assistant Professor Clea McNeely and Khalil Shikaki, Professor and Director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR). It also includes a group of “highly experienced and respected Palestinian scholars and practitioners, as well as leading experts in the methods of data collection and analysis.” The research team will train PSR’s 120 Palestinian field workers to conduct the interviews.
Barber is the author of “Adolescents and War: How Youth Deal with Political Violence.” Published in 2009 by Oxford University Press; the book is considered to be the authoritative work on research in this area.
UT’s Center for the Study of Youth and Political Violence was established in 2005 with the aim of becoming an authoritative source and training agent for the potential joint role of scholarship, programming, practice and policy in serving the needs of adolescents involved in political violence around the world. For more about the center, see http://youthviolence.tennessee.edu/mission.html.
The Jacobs Foundation funds research in the area of youth development in an effort to “unlock young people’s potential and help them to become productive and socially responsible members of society.”
1 Trackback(s)