Exploring self-care and self-development practices among refugee adolescents through photos: An art-based participatory qualitative study

Abstract

Introduction Photovoice and photo-elicitation are art-based participatory methods aiming to enable community members to create powerful visual representations to highlight the community issues/manners. This paper attempted to investigate self-care/self-development (SC/SD) practices among refugee adolescents in Germany, as part of a needs assessment based on triangulation (including three qualitative datasets from in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and photographic data). Methods Sixteen male and female refugee adolescents (aged 14–19) from 4 countries participated in the study. Before research implementation, a briefing session was held to explain the details of the project. Participants were asked to take their photos within 6 weeks and send them to the research team along with the answers to 5 questions, following a modified version of PHOTO protocol. For the photo-elicitation study, the participants were invited to join a group discussion session. Results From the collected data including 41 photos and their related statements, four major themes of: “I adapt to the new situation”, “I start to learn again”, “I find new opportunities”, and “I love myself” emerged, illustrating how the refugee adolescents visualized their perspective and practices toward SC/SD. In the group discussion session, the participants mainly emphasized the importance of keeping the good aspects of the original culture in their SC/SD practices. Conclusions The results of this study improve the understanding about SC/SD practices among refugee adolescents and provide a support to the existing literatures for using art-based methods as an effective participatory tool to communicate with adolescents, especially in hard-to-reach populations. The findings also reveal the capacity of refugee adolescents to be involved in youth-based program planning, which can be a significant potential in health care services for this population.