The Impact of Political Conflict on Youth:
Assessing Long-Term Well-Being via an Event History - Resource Model
Brian K. Barber, PI
Executive Summary
The basic research question that the proposed research answers is “What is the impact of political conflict on youth, especially as they transition to adulthood?” 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, the extant research has not adequately answered the question of impact, leaving us still unable to confidently recommend policies or intervention strategies.
The Need to Focus on Conflict Youth
Countless hundreds of thousands of young people across the globe experience war and other forms of violent political conflict. Many, along with the rest of their families, are the hapless victims of raging conflict; some are captured and coerced or otherwise recruited into serving as child soldiers for long periods; and some youth voluntarily participate in their societies’ desperate struggles. What is the effect of intense, complex, and often enduring periods of conflict on young people? How do their experiences with violent conflict shape their identities, impact their educational and labor force trajectories, affect their family formation and their ability to meet cultural expectations regarding adult responsibilities, and influence their attitudes and orientations toward violence, peace, conflict resolution, and the social good? Which of these youth could benefit from clinical intervention? What kinds of policies and programs would be most effective for governments to craft in order to maximize the success of these future adults as they move forward with their lives?
The Need to Expand Research
These key questions remain largely unanswered. Despite an impressive surge in research over the past few decades on youth growing up amidst political conflict, we still do not know enough about which young people continue to struggle into adulthood as a result of their conflict experiences, and why. This is so due to at least two major limitations of previous research, both of which this proposal addresses explicitly. First, most previous research has restricted the scope of study to the effects of exposure to violence on individual stress or psychopathology. Research grounded in this narrow, Western model of deficit and trauma regularly finds a statistical, but often weak, correlation between political violence exposure and heightened negative psychological functioning. But neither violence exposure nor individual psychological functioning are adequate indexes of the complex array of economic and social burdens that wars impose or of the range of economic, social, cultural, personal, religious, and political domains of functioning that define the lives of young people.
Second, the data that have been collected to answer the fundamental question of how political conflict impacts youth typically come from small, clinical, or otherwise unrepresentative samples of males, and they have been largely constricted to self-reported responses to investigator-designed surveys in one-time, cross-sectional snapshots. To date, no comprehensive studies of the long-term impact of conflict on youth’ lives have been conducted. Given that the vast majority of youth survive conflict, a solid understanding of the effect of their experiences with political conflict – and, critically therefore, credible recommendations for intervention, advocacy, and policy – can only be achieved by charting the development of their lives post-conflict (or often during renewed or intractable conflict). Moreover, data need to be sourced with local cultural expertise, including, importantly, the perspectives of youth themselves.
The Focus on Palestinian Youth
This project will serve as the basis for designing methodological templates to be employed in the study of young people affected by conflict in many parts of the world in the future. In so doing, it will focus first 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. Palestinian adolescents distinguished themselves from all other youth populations historically by virtue of their extraordinarily high involvement in political conflict. In addition, their conflict has been continuous throughout their young adulthood, and, moreover, it has become increasingly complicated given the factional divide among Palestinians themselves, resulting in essentially two politically and territorially distinct populations. Palestinians have also been selected because the Principal Investigator has extensive and well-published experience studying this very cohort of Palestinian youth, having studied them and their culture in depth as they emerged from their intense experiences with political conflict during the first Intifada. The findings made by this project about Palestinian youth will be directly relevant to the hundreds of thousands of youth throughout the world who are dealing with the rigors of life amidst political conflict.
An Event History-Resource Model
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. The project addresses the two main limitations mentioned above directly. The problem of model narrowness is addressed by employing an Event History-Resource theoretical framework. The model is innovative in that it integrates several existing theories from psychology and sociology, but also in its attention to culture and context in identifying critical economic, social, and political resources, the disruption or loss of which is posited as being central in war’s impact on youth as they attempt to move ahead with their lives.
Thus, in addition to chronicling direct experiences with political violence, the model carefully assesses disrupted access to key economic resources (e.g., food, shelter, electricity, mobility), critical social resources (e.g., loss of parents, siblings, extended family members, friends, and respected leaders), and political resources (e.g., political autonomy for the culture as a whole, the sense of political efficacy that accompanied participation in the struggle, etc.). In so doing, the model tests the specific hypothesis that the loss (particularly repeated loss) of such key resources will be more useful in predicting overall functioning than violence exposure. Furthermore, the model will identify those culturally specific resources that have the greatest impact. Should this hypothesis be correct then policy recommendations and intervention strategies can be clearly targeted on redressing the loss of resources key to the culture.
Data Collection
This project addresses the data limitations mentioned above in two, sequential phases. For Phase 1, a fully representative sample of 2,000 males and females who were ages 7 to 17 in 1987 when the first Intifada began will be drawn. This sample will include the very youth that the PI studied so intensively just after that Intifada ended as they were just beginning their transition to young adulthood. Each will be interviewed with a well-validated method of event history calendaring that chronicles the key events they have experienced during and since their heavy involvement in political conflict as adolescents. By carefully mapping their patterns of critical elements of life such as education, employment, family formation, and conflict experiences in this manner, the study can 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 domains of their lives. Unlike most past work, well-being will be assessed broadly to include culturally relevant domains of social, civic, political, psychosocial, and psychological functioning. These domains of well-being will be assessed by survey during the same home visit.
For Phase 2, a sub-sample of 500 of the core sample will be drawn to represent the main trajectories of conflict experiences and other life events that will be identified through rigorous statistical analyses of Phase 1 data. In this second interview, the respondents will be tape-recorded as they elaborate on their life history using as a guide and prompt the actual event history calendar they completed in Phase 1. This phase is critical in ensuring an accurate and rich understanding of the meaning and salience of the key events and patterns of their lives. 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.
Importantly, all instruments to be used in both phases of the project will be carefully developed by the project’s team of cultural experts. Together, the two phases of this project will create rich, deep, and culturally-sensitive data that will substantially extend our understanding of how experience with political conflict impacts young people as they develop in their lives. In so doing, it has the unique advantages of assessing long-term impact, on representative samples of males and females with extensive and complex experience with political violence, using sophisticated methods that synergize qualitative and quantitative forms of data.
In addition to the specific value of the findings of the proposed project, its findings will also be used to guide future phases of the project. Specifically, after having achieved the essential historical account of the impact of political conflict on well-being that this project will produce, future phases will assess the impact of political conflict in real time, both by following this project’s sample further, but also by studying a cohort of current Palestinian youth as they proceed through their own conflict experiences. Further, the findings and methodology will guide the investigation of other populations of conflict youth throughout the world by the same research team. Moreover, due to the extensive dissemination of the findings to be made in this project, other researchers from around the world will be able to incorporate the theory and methods of this project in their own work.
The Research Team
The project’s Principle Investigator, Dr. Brian K. Barber, is a leading expert on youth who experience political conflict. His book “Adolescents and War: How Youth Deal with Political Conflict” published in 2009 by Oxford University Press is the authoritative treatment of research on this topic. He has further books under contract with Palgrave/MacMillan Press and Harvard University Press. As a specialist in the study of Palestinian youth in particular, he has received fellowships to do his work with the Rockefeller Bellagio Italy Study Center and the Social Science Research Council. Barber is the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Youth and Political Violence at the University of Tennessee, a unique institute that explicitly integrates research and practice on conflict youth. Relevant to the extensive plans for dissemination of the proposed study’s findings is the Center’s successful Conference and Monograph series, whereby a select group of education, policy, humanitarian, non-governmental organization, youth development, and research professionals are convened to discuss the needs of youth in specific regions of the world that have experienced political conflict and to generate best practices and interventions that are most appropriate to these youths’ needs. The monograph series resulting from these conferences is being published by Oxford University Press. Dr. Barber is joined by Dr. Clea McNeely, an associate faculty in the Center. Dr. McNeely, most recently deputy director of the Center for Adolescent Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has considerable expertise in conducting and analyzing data from large-scale studies of international populations of youth. Additionally, the team is buttressed by highly experienced and respected Palestinian scholars and practitioners, as well as leading experts in the methods of data collection and analysis that will be employed in the project.
Capacity Building
Apart from the academic benefits to theory, methods, and findings that the study will provide, it will also build important local research capacity. Specifically, data will be collected by a well-experienced team of 120 native field workers. This project will train the workers carefully in the new interview methods employed in both phases, and will thereby expand local expertise with innovative methods that can be employed in their future research work. In turn, the cultural expertise of the field workers will enrich and enhance the method of data collection and will thereby build the cross-cultural capacity of other researchers who adopt the method but heretofore have been guided largely by the narrower trauma paradigm.
Contributions to Policy and Practice
Beyond its important implications for research theory and method, the focus of the proposed study on resources and its attention to cultural perspectives of them has the potential to contribute significantly to advocacy, policy and practice. The proposed research will identify the type and timing of resource loss that has the largest negative impact on young people, as well as the most sustaining resources for this culture during and after political conflict. Restoring and shoring up those resources should be a funding, policy and programmatic priority, one that has potentially greater impact on well-being than the current emphasis on treating individuals for psychological effects. To this end, the project includes an explicit focus on dissemination of the study’s findings via three seminars patterned after the approach described above to bridge research and practice. These seminars – to be held in Jerusalem, Washington, DC, and Zurich – will convene research and practice experts from the Middle East, the U.S., and Europe, respectively. In order to make them maximally accessible, materials describing the findings of the study will be written jointly with researchers and journalists or technical writers in English and Arabic. The research team will also collaborate with the Foundation to translate the materials into German to facilitate their dissemination in Switzerland.
Fit with the Jacobs Foundation
The proposed project is closely aligned with the Foundation’s focus on the integration of interdisciplinary research instruments with effective interventions to achieve a lasting impact on the lives of youth. Through the implementation of innovative and integrative theory and research methods and through the wide use of various dissemination tools the project will have long-term implications on youth development theory, research design, policy and practice.
Two main aspects of the proposed project make it particularly suitable for funding from the Jacobs Foundation. First, the central objectives of the proposed project directly challenge traditional models of understanding youth functioning in difficult contexts. Specifically, the intent of the project―to analyze economic, political, and social components of war, and to assess well-being comprehensively with explicit attention to cultural priorities―extends significantly past the narrower, trauma and deficit models that continue to predominate in funded projects. Relatedly, large U.S. funding agencies, such as the US National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, are reluctant to fund proposals that are as methodologically innovative as is the proposed project, particularly concerning its implementation of the Event History Calendar and the follow-up Life History Interview methods that have heretofore not been used on a population of conflict youth. The novelty of these methods, the endorsement of the value of the voices of the participants, and the role of culture in generating meaning are pioneering and non-traditional relative to what larger agencies typically fund.
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