Southeast Asian Refugee Youth: A Comparative Study (SARYS)

The Southeast Asian Refugee Youth Study (SARYS) is a local community study of the adaptation of refugee youth from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. It is a follow-up study of the educational achievements of the children of the Southeast Asian refugee parents surveyed in the Indochinese Health and Adaptation Research Project (IHARP), 1982-1984 data. The project was conducted in San Diego, California and was partly funded by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). The purpose of this study was to examine areas of both successes and problems of refugee youth regarding their educational and occupational attainments and aspirations, and to evaluate their prospects for economic self-sufficiency. At the heart of the SARYS study is a series of qualitative interviews with a sample of Vietnamese, Khmer and Hmong refugee youth. The SARYS research project was based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches. At the quantitative level it compared Southeast Asian students against other ethnic groups in the San Diego area on various indices of educational attainment, occupational aspirations and problem areas. Among Southeast Asians it compared each of the major refugee groups (Vietnamese, Chinese, Lao, Khmer, Hmong) to each other. There were two main quantitative data sources: (1) official records from the San Diego City Schools (SDCS) on school enrollments, academic performance, and student's career choices; and (2) the data set from the Indochinese Health & Adaptation Research Project (IHARP). Data were also collected and coded from the official records of all Indochinese juvenile delinquents in the San Diego County Probations Department for 1984, and from official data on student dropouts and suspensions from the San Diego City Schools. At the qualitative level, the SARYS study was limited to an in-depth examination of three groups of refugee youth: the Vietnamese, the Khmer, and the Hmong. Additional qualitative data were also collected on the Lao and to a lesser extent on Chinese-Vietnamese youth. The interviews involved two samples: 1) a total of 26 youths: 12 Vietnamese, 9 Khmer and 5 Hmong. These respondents ranged in age from 18 to 26 years at the time of the interviews, and they ranged in age from 6 to 17 years at the time they left the homeland. This youth sample contained approximately equal numbers of males (N=14) and females (N=12). The interviews were open-ended, averaged between 2.5 and 4.5 hours, and covered such areas as migration and family histories, educational and occupational attainments and aspirations in the U.S., and strategies and problems of adjustment and acculturation within family, peer and community contexts. In addition, participants were occasionally recontacted to verify certain information or to follow up on issues that had been raised during the initial interview and extensive field notes were kept by investigators during each interview; 2) 52 adult informants (both Americans and Southeast Asians) with specialized knowledge about the youth. These interviews were supplemented by ongoing ethnographic work and field observation from the past several years conducted in the local refugee communities. The interviews ranged from a half-hour to 3 hours in length. Informants were drawn from four broad institutional sectors: (1) the school system; (2) social service agencies; (3) local police and probation departments, and related diversion programs; and (4) parents of refugee youth and other ethnic community informants. Variables assessed in the SARYS study also included: refugee youths, the similarities and dissimilarities between these two groups, the factors/processes differentiating these types of youths, which of those factors/processes were givens (and hence not amenable to programmatic interventions) and which could be altered by intervention efforts. Also considered were adaptive resources (the pre-migration personal and family characteristics of refugee youth and how they relate to their prospects for self-sufficiency), the principal differences among the various ethnocultural groups in this refugee population, adaptive contexts (their institutional and situational contexts of family, community, and economy and how are they related to each other as well as what adaptive challenges, obstacles and opportunities these pose for refugee youth), adaptive strategies (what current and future roles, strategies and plans do they have, anticipate, and desire regarding family, community, school and the world of work? How do they define themselves in relation to those institutions?) and adaptive outcomes (given their resources, roles, definitions of the situation, and institutional contexts, what are their prospects for developing English language proficiency, attaining educational goals, and finding employment?)