Emotional and social adjustment of immigrant children remigrated to the home country

Abstract

ABSTRACT The mass migration of the migrants is one of the most important events of the recent century. During the first half of the twentieth century, more than hundered million people migrated voluntarily or forcibly from one country to another. Large scale international labour migration was perhaps the most significant social event of the century for Turkey. The mass migration of the foreign workers to the industrialized countries involves important adaptation processes for both the immigrants and the recieving countries. Also remigration involves a readaptation period. Generally migrants do not think about remigration to home country. But Turkish workers in Europe intend to remi grate to the home country. As in migration, migrants need a new adaptation period in remigration. Some inter-cultural studies show that remigration to the home country requires more time to adapt and is more complicated than migration. Returning to home country goes through four steps: (1) good feelings and hapiness (2) stress and anxiety (3) internalization and (4) adjustment. Some researches stated that the youth who spend their childhood in a foreign country fear from remigrating to their home country. When they return to homeland* they face linguistic difficulties an unfamiliar school system and culture. They would go into a new readaptation period which would be hard for them. In the present study the aim was to compare four groupsof children: (1) the children who remigrated to the home country (Group 1) (2) the children who are separated from their families during migration period and lived in home country with relatives (Group 2) (3) the control group children who are the classmates of the first, second and forth group children (Group 3) (4) the children who experienced both the remigration after a period of migration and seperation from the family members (Group 4). Subjects were 183 secondary school students aged between 12-16 years from Ankara Anadolu High School. There were 77 girls and 106 boys. In order to measure the maladjustment levels of the subjects (1) Rutter Children's Questionnaire and (2) Trait Anxiety Scale were used. To test the reliabilities of the scales Cronbach Alpha Reliability Coefficients were computed. In Rutter Children's Questionnaire, three items were eliminated because of their 0.00 item-total corrolation. The remaining 23 items were used. To analyse the Rutter Children's Questionnaire, factor analysis (with principal factor with iteration) was computed. As a result 3 factors were found. Factor 1 was called anti -social deviance factor, factor 2 was called emotional deviance factor and factor 3 was called mixed deviance factor. These three factors accounted for 42.2 percent of the total variance. After that in order to test the reliability of the questionnaire with 23 items Cronbach Alpha Reliability coefficients were computed for all groups and for each group on each factor. The Cronbach' s Alpha of the 23 item questionnaire was found to be.69.In the present study Cronbach Alpha of the Trait Anxiety Scale was found to be.41 which is lower than Kuder Richardson Alpha reliability of.83 computed by Öner and LeCompte (1982). In order to compare the groups in terms of adjustment and anxiety levels on each factor and all items together one-way analysis of variance was used. Also, in order to identify the predictors of the disturbances for each group regression analysis was made. Before making the regression analysis, pearson correlations between the total scores of Rutter Children's Questionnaire, its factors, Trait Anxiety Scale and the predictors were computed. To identify the predictors that could be included in the regression analysis,.20 corrolation coefficient was taken as the lowest criterion. In One-way analysis of variance, only one significant result was obtained. The groups are different from each other only in terms of the emotional deviance factor (factor 2) of Rutter Children's Questionnaire. A series of one-tailed t tests were computed in order to identify the groups that are significantly different from the others. The results showed that Group 4 subjects have significantly higher emotional deviance score than Group 1 subjects ( t (78) =2.18, p <.05); Group 2 subjects ( t (60) = 2.13, p <.05), and Group 3 subjects ( t (125) = 3.61, p <.05). Group 1, Group 2, Group 3 subjects have not significantly higher or lower emotional deviance score than each other. In regression analysis some meaningful results were obtained, these are as follows :In the remigrated group `Being girl` increases the possibility of emotional deviance and `living for a long time in Federal Republic of Germany` increases the state anxiey level of the subjects. In the seperated group, `having a mother who has her own business` increases the possibility of emotional deviance and `having a father who migrated first` or `having a mother and father who migrated together and left the child behind` increases the possibility of state anxiety. In the mixed group, ` having a mother who has her own business` increases the ratings of anti-social deviance and and the ratings of all items (23 items) of Rutter Children's Questionnaire. The results showed that there are almost no differences (except for factor 2 in Group 4) between the groups. This might be the result of a tendency of Turkish families to continue living in their traditional way of life and not integrating with the foreign culture. This conservation of the traditional way of life may make immigrant children more familiar with the home country. This conservation of the traditional norms might also be valid for the seperated children. These children are cared and supported the close relatives because of close traditional bounds in the families. The only significant result was that Group 4 is significantly different than Group 1, Group 2 and Group 3 in terms of `emotional deviance` ratings of Rutter Children's Questionnaire. This may be because of the threefold stress thatthese children are faced with. They experienced migration, remigration and seperation processes and all of these three processes are traumatic events. During migration and remigration, subjects experienced two types of culture shock and between them they also lived the seperation trauma. These three types of stress may result in being more deviant in terms of factor 2 ratings of Rutter Children's Questionnaire. For future studies some suggestions were made. One of these suggestions was including a fifth group containing migrant children who are living in Federal Republic of Germany to examine all dimensions of this phenomenon. Second suggestion was to examine the effects of the language of school where the remi grant children are studying. Another suggestion was to help with the special problems of remigrated students, who are having adjustment difficulties, through counseling services geared towards the special problems of such students. 10