Research Questions

The aim of this project is to provide a systematic review of research on the integration of refugee children and youth published in academic journals in English, German or French. The systematic review covers three key dimensions of integration: Language and learning, social integration and wellbeing (Pritchard & Ramos, 2016; Ramos & Maehler, 2017). Additionally, we will conduct meta-analyses that focus on language acquisition, emotional integration and methodology issues.

Basic Design

A systematic literature review can be described by six characteristics (Cooper, 1989): Focus, aim, perspective, scope (coverage), structure, and addressees. The aim of our systematic review is to summarize previous work on child and youth refugees, focusing on the research methods used by researchers. To this end, contributions extracted from various databases are evaluated from a neutral perspective. The review identifies different methodological approaches and provides insights for an interdisciplinary research community and policymakers. Furthermore, the systematic review and meta-analyses will be documented according to the PRISMA procedure (Moher, Liberat, Tetzlaff, & Altman, 2009).

Project Status

First results of the project look at English-(n=1134) and German-language (n=235) peer reviewed articles, which were coded to identify dimensions of research, methods used, and key variables. Results will be submitted for publication soon. At the moment the data on French language publications is still in preparation.