Introducing Stakeholder Perceptions of Refugee Children’s Wellbeing

This thesis introduces a new approach of conceptualising refugee children’s wellbeing by incorporating insights of multiple stakeholders. This was achieved by five empirical studies using different qualitative and psychometric designs. The first study aimed to establish the challenges in addressing refugee children’s wellbeing using a sample of refugee children, parents, and professionals. Stakeholders highlighted the challenges in education wellbeing, indicating lack of understanding of refugee children’s mental health needs in the education system. The second study aimed to bridge this gap by introducing a new model of teachers’ perceptions of refugee children’s school wellbeing ‘The WELLS’, and developing a new scale. Study three aimed to test the underlying structure of the new developed scale using an independent sample of schoolteachers. Results suggested a three-dimensional model of teachers’ perception of refugee children’s school wellbeing; mental, academic, and social. The fourth study introduced a short form of the new scale, in order to provide schoolteachers with an efficient measure of refugee students’ mental health needs, and to support the multidimensional nature of the scale. To this end, two samples of schoolteachers were recruited in this study to confirm and test the replicability of the three-factor structure. Finally, a sample of schoolteachers was recruited in the fifth study to align the three dimensions against convergent and discriminant constructs.

Overall, this thesis offers a comprehensive theoretical understanding of refugee children’s wellbeing as perceived by stakeholders. Furthermore, a novel measurement tool designed to assess refugee children's school wellbeing from the perspective of teachers was introduced. It contributes to improve our understanding of refugee children's mental health needs and offers a valuable resource for interventions that future research in this area can benefit from.