Social Support as a Moderator of Acculturative Stress

In Austria, in 2006 over 13,000 persons applied for political asylum, with people from Chechnya and Afghanistan being the most prominent groups among them. There is little organized help for refugees towards their acculturation, e.g. with respect to learning German, finding work, dealing with their children`s educational and schooling problems, coping with suspicion and prejudice in their neighborhoods, etc. Based on Berry`s theory of acculturative stress and Lazarus and Folkman`s transaction model of stress, the present study intends to investigate the effectiveness of sponsorship programs as a means of social support for refugees from Chechnya and Afghanistan in Austria. Asylum seekers who can be expected to be granted asylum in the foreseeable future will also be included. Previous studies which investigated the effectiveness of sponsorship programs have yielded equivocal results which are in line with empirical findings on social support. Besides the possibility of positive effects, negative results of social support are well documented. Taking these findings into account, we expect sponsorship to yield positive results provided that sponsors will be properly selected, trained and supervised. Under such professionally sound conditions, sponsorship programs for refugees up to now only rarely were investigated with respect to their efficacy. We hypothesize that sponsorship will lead to an increase in perceiving, appraising and using social support. Social support as provided by sponsorship is expected to be effective as a moderating variable, improving cognitive control and problem appraisal, reducing psychological and somatic stress and improving psychological and socio- cultural adaptation. We also expect sponsorship to reduce perceived contact discrepancy and experienced discrimination and we expect it to improve coping effectiveness and to promote an "integration" type of acculturation strategy. We also hypothesize a "dose effect" in the sense that the more social support is perceived, the higher will be the effect of sponsorship on the dependent variables. We want to test these hypotheses by installing a six-months sponsorship program for a total of N = 60 female and male adult refugees and asylum seekers from Chechnya and Afghanistan in Austria. The effectiveness of sponsorship in the intervention group (N = 30) will be tested against a waiting-list control group (N = 30) which will receive sponsorship six months later. Participants will be assigned at random to the intervention and the control group and they will receive a set of questionnaires as well as semi-structured interviews at pre- and post- occasions, as well as at three and six-months follow-up in order to test the hypotheses. Sponsors will operate on a voluntary basis, rendering their services free of charge. During an initial phase of three months, sponsors will receive extensive training and their work will be supervised by experts of Health and - with respect to child rearing and schooling issues - Developmental Psychology. The study is expected to yield recommendations to governmental authorities as well as to NGOs towards scientifically approved procedures of providing support to refugees and asylum seekers in Austria.

Sponsorships (six months duration) were highly effective in improving various aspects of psychological well-being in adult refugees and asylum seekers in Austria. A total of 63 clients participated, 27 women and 36 men, 42 of them from Chechnya and 21 from Afghanistan. Their mean age was 33.08 (Range 16 to 58) years. There were 35 sponsors, ten men and 25 women. We used psychological questionnaires as well as interviews in order to evaluate project outcome. Sponsors had been recruited by mass media, and were carefully selected, trained, and supervised in the course of the research. We assessed the effects of the sponsorships by comparing a first group of clients with a wait-list control group who received sponsorships after a waiting period of six months. In addition, the clients were followed up three and six months after sponsorships had been completed, both by questionnaires and interviews. Only clients who suffered from marked symptoms of post-traumatic stress benefited from sponsorships. In these clients, sponsorships considerably reduced anxiety, depression, and psychological problems and this effect remained stable at the follow-up assessments three and six months after sponsorships had ended. Sponsorships had no substantial effects, however, on the clients` living conditions, on psycho-social aspects like finding work or on their coping capabilities. Results indicated that sponsors should be matched as well as possible to clients according to their gender and age. Quite surprisingly, many potential clients, after an initial contact when the idea of sponsorships had been explained to them, were reluctant to accept assistance from strangers, some of them expressing feelings of wounded pride, whereas others suspected hidden motives on the sponsors` part. Even after sponsorships had commenced, it was especially Chechen men who often continued to express doubts of this kind. These difficulties should be understood within the cultural framework of collectivist societies, where social support usually is granted by the extended families, whereas voluntary commitment is a phenomenon of Western, individualist culture. In other cases, difficulties resulted from sponsors putting too much strain on their clients when expecting progress too early or from overprotecting them. Whereas sponsorships were used worldwide as an aid for refugees and asylum seekers in the past, little was known about their outcome. From the present results predictions can be made, in which cases sponsorships can be expected to be effective and what their effects will be. Moreover, supervisors will have guidelines at hand, enabling them to circumvent typical pitfalls in the course of the sponsorships. Results were received by practitioners with great interest nationally and internationally, for example by Caritas, the Federation of the International Red Cross/Red Crescent Societies and Austrian Red Cross.