Acculturation, Quality of Life and Mental Health of African Refugees in Six EU Countries

Berry (1997) considers the acculturative experience as a major life event that is charac­terized by stress, demands cognitive appraisal of the situation, and requires coping strategies. These processes and their psychological outcomes are likely to be influenced by both societal composition and individual level vari­ables. Society of origin, group acculturation, and society of settlement, and vari­ous individual variables are strong fac­tors affecting acculturation experience and level of stress and by implication, mental health. The similarity-attraction hypothesis (Byrne, 1969) is a theoretical account of why social contact between culturally dis­parate individuals is difficult and often stressful. The core assumption being that culture contact is inherently stressful with consequences for mental health.

The aim of this paper therefore, is to empirically describe acculturative stress, quality of life and mental health of African refugees in six EU countries-namely, the UK, Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands, and Spain. The study was in principle a cross-sectional study of 3500 African refugees in 6 EU countries. The paper describes empirically from a psychological perspective, the responses of African refugees in Europe. Data will be analyzed using correlation, multiple regression and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to understand the relationship between acculturative stress, quality of life and mental health.