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Psychology. Journal of the Higher School of Economics. 2023. Vol. 20. N 4. P. 796-813. Психология. Журнал Высшей школы экономики. 2023. Т. 20. № 4. С. 796-813. DOI: 10.17323/1813-8918-2023-4-796-813
RESEARCHING SOCIAL RESILIENCE IN THE CONTEXT OF MIGRANTS' LIFE TRANSITION: A QUALITATIVE METHODOLOGICAL MOSAIC
A.H. QAMAR"
' Lunds University, Box 23, 22100 Lund, Sweden
Исследование социальной устойчивости в контексте переходного периода в жизни мигрантов: мозаика качественных методов
А.Х. Камар"
'Лундский университет, Box 23,22100, Лунд, Швеция
Abstract
Migration is a psychosocial challenge, and migrants' transitory experiences in host countries are shaped by a combination of linked environmental factors. The absence of social aspects of resilience, as well as disciplinary limitations and biases, hinder the methodological rigor and flexibility needed to investigate social resilience as a phenomenon that occurs at the intersection of social, cultural, and political environments. Based on the social constructionist perspective, this paper identifies the need for a methodological mosaic and proposes a methodological guideline to investigate social resilience among migrants embedded in a multi-layered environment and person-environment interaction. The proposed methods include participant observation, biographical interviews, resilience diaries, focus groups, participants' workshops, and expert conferencing. The inclusion of participant-friendly methods provides a space to listen to the voices of participants across the margins, and to engage experts and
Резюме
Миграция является психосоциальной проблемой, и опыт адаптации мигрантов в новой стране формируется под воздействием совокупности взаимосвязанных факторов окружающей среды. Отсутствие социальных аспектов устойчивости, а также отраслевые ограничения и предубеждения не способствуют методологической строгости и гибкости, необходимым в исследованиях социальной устойчивости как явления, возникающего на стыке социальных, культурных и политических факторов среды. Исходя из теории социального конструкцио-низма, в этой статье мы обосновываем необходимость применения мозаики исследовательских методов и предлагаем методологическое руководство для исследования социальной устойчивости мигрантов, находящихся в многослойной среде и осуществляющих взаимодействие на уровне «человек-среда». Предлагаемые методы включают наблюдение за испытуемыми, биографические интервью, дневники устойчивости, фокус-группы, семинары для участников и совещания экспертов. Включение методов, адаптированных к участникам исследования, позволяет услышать голос каждого, а также привлечь экспертов и социальных работников к
social workers in a participant-centered data examination. The concept of using a methodological mosaic in social resilience and migration studies provides a solid foundation for conducting multidisciplinary social science research. It gives the freedom to engage experts from various disciplinary backgrounds and benefits from diverse perspectives to connect the methodological pieces. The methodological mosaic described in this paper can be used to advance interconnected and participant-friendly data collection strategies and to gain a holistic understanding of migrants' lived experiences. The paper, though a methodological proposal, contributes to broadening the methodological scope and integration in migration studies.
анализу ориентированных на участников данных. Концепция использования методологической мозаики при изучении социальной устойчивости и миграции обеспечивает прочную основу для проведения междисциплинарных социальных исследований. Такой подход позволяет привлекать экспертов из разных отраслей и опираться на различные точки зрения при консолидации отдельных методологических компонентов. Мозаика качественных методов, описанная в статье, может применяться для развития взаимосвязанных и адаптированных к участникам стратегий сбора данных, а также для получения целостного понимания жизненного опыта мигрантов. Данная статья является по сути предложением методологического подхода и при этом вносит свой вклад в расширение стратегий и интеграции методов исследований феномена миграции.
Keywords: Interdisciplinary qualitative research, methodological mosaic, social resilience, triangulation, migration, lived experiences, phenomenology, participant-friendly methods.
Azher Hameed Qamar — Post-doc Researcher, School of Social Work, Lunds University, PhD in Interdisciplinary Child Research.
Research Area: social resilience, migration, integration, qualitative research. E-mail: [email protected], [email protected]
Ключевые слова: междисциплинарные качественные исследования, мозаика методов исследования, социальная устойчивость, триангуляция, миграция, жизненный опыт, феноменология, адаптированные к участникам методы исследования.
Камар Ашер Хамид — постдокторантура, факультет социальной работы, Лундский университет (Лунд, Швеция), PhD (междисциплинарные исследования детской психологии). Сфера научных интересов: социальная устойчивость, миграция, интеграция, качественные исследования.
Контакты: [email protected], [email protected]
Towards the end of the 20th century, the dominant resilience paradigms presented resilience as a capacity of the individual that can determine the 'psychological fitness' of a person to fight back adversities. This conceptualization (as appears in popular definitions) refers to those who have the ability or capacity to survive and bounce back (Garmezy et al., 1984; Masten, 2001). Recent development in resilience studies have addressed two important shortcomings. First, the concept of resilience should not be static to label 'resilient' and 'non-resilient' people based on capacities or abilities they have. This conceptualization provides a 'heroic' notion of resilience as an individual characteristic and disregards the social aspects of resilience. The non-social view of resilience excludes the sociological examination of person-environment interaction and social behaviors that contribute to a resilience experience (Dagdeviren et al., 2016; Est^vao et al., 2017; Garrett, 2016).
Second, the notion of 'bouncing back' as it appears in dominant resilience studies is not sufficient to explain how resilience works in a social system. Hence, it is pertinent to understand resilience in its continuity to 'bounce ahead' (Holtorf, 2018; Norris et al., 2008; Pendall et al., 2010). Human lives are anchored in their structural contexts and lived experiences. One way or another, humans respond to change and challenges in their lives. The social dimensions of resilience spotlight the dynamic and multifaceted concept of resilience that is complex and embedded in person-environment interactions and contextual diversities. Hence, research into social resilience requires the conceptualization of resilience regarding the environmental context and social experience corresponding to change and challenges (Qamar, 2023; Wingens et al., 2011). Emphasizing social resilience and framing resilience as a social construct (see Qamar, 2023), in this article, qualitative research methods are presented as intended to be used in my research in Sweden.
Social Construction of Resilience
There is no single definition of 'resilience', and it has evolved as a multidiscipli-nary concept. However, in social sciences, the concept of resilience is often associated with the coping capacity and recovery response to challenged conditions, using psychological and environmental resources, and yielding positive outcomes (Masten, 2001; Smith-Osborne & Whitehill-Bolton, 2013; Ungar, 2012; Yeager & Dweck, 2012). Emerging from earlier psychological discourses on personality traits (the personal capacity to cope and recover through stress) determining resilient or non-resilient personality traits, the concept has traveled from the studies of innate personality traits to learned behavior embedded in person-environment interactions. Hence, during the first decade of the twentieth century, resilience studies simultaneously focused on resilience as an outcome and as a dynamic process (Est^vao et al., 2017; Pangallo et al., 2015; Saja et al., 2019; Southwick et al., 2014).
The concept of social resilience (in social sciences) gains attention with Adger's (Adger, 2000; Adger et al., 2002) contribution to studying the role of environmental contexts, structure, and livelihood in shaping resilience. Afterward the term 'social resilience' was defined as a coping, adaptive and transformative capacity (Keck & Sakdapolrak, 2013), risk perception, associated coping, learning, and planning abilities (Marshall & Marshall, 2007), an outcome related to a sustained well-being while facing challenges (Hall & Lamont, 2013), a reactive and proactive capacity to cope, adjust and develop through the crisis (Obrist et al., 2010), and a dynamic social process that shapes the capacities to response, recover and grow within the context (Bohle et al., 2009; Dagdeviren & Donoghue, 2019; Qamar, 2023). Adger (2000) defined social resilience as "the ability of human communities to withstand external shocks to their social infrastructure". Social infrastructure is a broader term, and the abilities of human communities to respond to adversities are culturally and historically located. It extends beyond the communities' access to material resources, and the strength of their formal institutions. Environmental factors significantly affect the individual's experience of resilience, stress response, and
psycho-social well-being. Also, cultural adherence, informal social networking, local knowledge, belief practices, the social value of relationships and the community, and interdependence, all contribute to social resilience as a complex coherent whole. Family, community, and institutions work together to provide cultural, social, and political support, which contributes to the social resilience process. These interlinked supportive environmental resources assist individuals in coping and adaptation. The interaction between people and their environments, as well as the experiences of individuals, indicate the social construction of resilience as a holistic phenomenon. The studies done in colonial contexts with a history of systematic marginalization called into question the notion of resilience as a quantifiable construct and urged that social resilience be conceptualized and researched as a dynamic and complex phenomenon (Bogardi & Fekete, 2018; Atallah, 2016; Hundt et al., 2004; Dagdeviren & Donoghue, 2019; Qamar, 2023).
A constructionist perspective on resilience offers a socio-ecological explanation of resilience that helps in understanding it as a socially and culturally embedded phenomenon. Ungar (2011, 2013) explains resilience as a socio-ecological process and provides four principles for researching resilience: a) decentering — focusing on the person-environment process as the locus of change; b) complexity — the interactional pattern of the environment and young people's capacities; c) atypical-ity — openness to understanding resilience beyond pre-determined outcomes; and d) cultural relativity — resilience as culturally and historically embedded. To con-textualize the resilience process, it is important to give voice to people's experiences and investigate the environmental pathways that contribute to person-environment interaction during the resilience process. Beyond the psychopathological perspective, and shifting from 'I' to 'we, us, and they,' the concept of resilience has evolved from a trait perspective to contextualization of person-environment interaction. It became obvious that 'resilience' is at the crossroads of several interconnected environmental factors, demanding a holistic knowledge of the context that shapes the social resilience process.
Researching Social Resilience: An Interdisciplinary Perspective
As a post-doc researcher, I am investigating social resilience and young adult migrants' lived experiences in Sweden. The study is narrowly focused on young adult migrants living in Sweden and it is relevant to a multidimensional social resilience project that is an initiative of Lund University's 2030 agenda on research on social sustainability. Recent migrant studies conducted in Sweden cover a wide range of migrant-related issues, such as parenting practices (Wisso & Back-Wiklund, 2021; Baghdasaryan et al., 2021), housing (Stepanova & Romanov, 2021), education and work (Ahlgren & Rydell, 2020; Carlbaum, 2021; Messina Dahlberg et al., 2021), and integration (Eliassi, 2017; Lyck-Bowen, 2020). Though these studies cover a wide range of social issues relevant to migrants' lives in host countries, the choices of methods are limited to qualitative interviews and focus group discussions. Particularly concerning rapidly changing political situations in Europe and the rise of right-wing populism, the migrants' issues are in the limelight.
In this connection, the methodological strategies opted for by the researchers require a consideration of bringing pieces of data (collected through multiple sources) together to form a holistic perspective in contemporary migration studies.
Qualitative research provides an interpretive approach to understanding human lives in their environmental contexts by collecting and interpreting knowledge about processes and experiences (Willig, 2001). Qualitative research methods contribute to resilience studies with their flexibility and depth that can be used to investigate resilience and associated risk factors in the specific sociocultural context. In this connection, the qualitative research approach can uncover the whole phenomenon of resilience by giving voices to the participants, avoiding generalizations, and accounting for diversities in experiences through a thick description of the phenomenon (Ungar, 2003).
Qualitative research deals with the depth of the data grounded in lived experiences and the construction of realities by the people in their social contexts (Ibid.). In this connection, the 'context' provides a framework for interpretation. The social, political, and cultural characteristics of the society form a multifaceted and complex environmental context. While the reasons for fleeing one's native country may be comparable (for example, in the case of war-torn countries), being a migrant is not always the same experience. It is shaped by migrants' risk perceptions, adaptation, and transformation, and impacted by time, location, and the environment. Social resilience is a contextually ingrained interdisciplinary phenomenon that cannot be investigated using disciplinary theoretical and/or methodological 'biases' (Qamar, 2023). The interdependence of human beings in the social world shapes their lives over time and thus demands a researcher be close to the participants' transitory experiences without following the preset linear pathways to interpretation (Hareven, 2018; Hutchison, 2010). The researchers can evaluate the change and challenges related to migrants' life course adaptation strategies by recognizing the diversity of experiences and the intersectional influence of environmental factors. The intersectional frame of references (such as in sociology, political science, anthropology, and psychology) should be used to study acculturation, identity, status, and agency, all of which must be addressed holisti-cally through theoretical and methodological triangulation. Interdisciplinary qualitative research can unfold and interpret the complex context of social resilience and migrants' ever-changing lives in host countries.
The combination of personal and social resources, the impact of environmental factors, and human response to adversity and crisis are considerably linked to the process of resilience (Coyne & Downy, 1991; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984; Thoits, 1986; Berry & Kim, 1987). Hence, in order to study social resilience as a process in the context of young adult migrants' lived experiences in a host country, I have two objectives that lead the proposed research methodologically and theoretically:
1. The concept of 'social resilience' is contextualized to reveal the phenomenon in its broader socio-cultural context and indigenous understanding. Researching resilience with a ground-up interdisciplinary approach is required.
2. To give voice to the perceptions and experiences of people, methodological rigor is achieved by employing a methodological mosaic, in which different methods are connected to get a holistic perspective.
The constructionist perspective of resilience (Figure 1) is methodologically rigorous and involves substantial qualitative research. The experiences of social resilience of migrants in a host country reflect their transition and transformation from risk perception to adaptability and stability. Cultural (including acculturation challenges), social (belongingness and support), and political (policies and provisions) factors shape their changing lives in the context of their survival and integration in a hosting country during this transitory experience (see, for example, Berry & Kim, 1987; Caplan, 2007; Taloyan et al., 2011; Jasso & Rosenzweig, 1990; Odmalm, 2011). Hence, social resilience as a learned and constructed phenomenon occurs at the nexus of environmental factors and person/environment interaction.
To explore migrants' experiences in their empirical depth, I elaborate on migrants' experiences as the first-hand illustration of everyday life connecting the temporality of events and turning points, and a description of social interaction with relevant social actors and institutions. Hence, the aim to gain insight into migrants' lives in host countries should address the social experiences in time and space. In this regard, two key aspects of qualitative research must be strengthened to investigate social resilience. First, the depth of data to be collected includes textural (what is experienced) and structural (how it is experienced) characteristics of the data. Second, validation in qualitative research is always challenging. I am interested in young adult migrants' lived experiences in host countries.
Figure 1
A Constructionist Perspective on Social Resilience as a Person-Environment Process
Religion, beliefs, values, norms, cultural practices adherence, acculturation
Institutionalization, policies, provisions, political will, and participation
Socio-economic status, social relations, family, peers, neighbourhood
Conceptualizing social resilience as a phenomenon "characterized by vulnerable individuals' or groups' social experiences and social practices in the face of political, economic, cultural, and social (PECS) environmental changes and challenges" (Qamar, 2023:3), and occurring at the nexus of person-environment interaction (Saja et al., 2019; Southwick et al., 2014), I propose a methodological mosaic to investigate the migrants' experiences of risk, vulnerability, and coping in shaping his or her life in a situational and environmental context. The proposed plan is based on my post-doc project that is intended to investigate how social experiences contribute to young adult migrants' social resilience, and how social resilience as a process shapes these experiences.
A Qualitative Methodological Mosaic
A method paper is different from a protocol paper (that requires an outcome to audit for further application). Hence, method papers include a methodological understanding of the researchers relevant to their study areas. A method paper provides the methodological procedures and strategies that researchers intend to implement in their study. To make it discoverable for other researchers, authors writing method papers provide sufficient descriptions of methods and relevant resources (Leist & Hengstler, 2018).
My idea of a qualitative methodological mosaic is based on the Mosaic Approach that Alison Clark and Peter Moss developed to conduct research with children using a multimethod approach to collect data and piecing them together to see the whole picture (see Clark & Moss, 2001). As the mosaic approach was used to provide a space for children to voice themselves as loud and clear as it can be, I use this approach to draw on the qualitative methodological mosaic to give voice to young adult migrants and present their lived experiences in my research. The mosaic approach is similar to multimethod triangulation, and I do not claim it is essentially different. However, the strength of using the mosaic approach in qualitative research is the researcher's space to practice creative, flexible, and participant-centered data collection methods. It is a consideration of using multimethod triangulation where methods are selected as 'participant-friendly' with multiple options to give voice to a marginalized population (for example, children, old people, people with disabilities, migrants, minorities, etc.). Though the analysis of the data collected in various forms and different ways may be challenging, particularly while piecing them together in a mosaic of meanings, the dataset (collected through a methodological mosaic) will be rich in its content and authentic for participants' voices and presentations in it. For data analysis, researchers may use a relevant data analysis approach according to the type of data, and findings may be synthesized to see interconnections and patterns as emerged from the data.
While quantitative research approaches predominate in resilience studies, bottom-up evidence is lacking to comprehend the diversity and interconnectedness of several aspects of resilience inherent in the environmental context and temporality of the phenomenon. The common methods used to study migrants' experiences are surveys or interviews that have provided useful information identifying the challenges and
resilience strategies in migrants' lives. However, the notion of a political and social vulnerability associated with migrants in host countries demands methodological rigor to gather first-hand information capturing migrants' social lives and their interactions with social actors and institutions. Considering the multidimensional-ity and complexity of the social context of migrants' lives, a qualitative research method mosaic can serve the purpose to unearth the social experiences and practices corresponding to social resilience. In this connection, a qualitative research method mosaic involving methodological triangulation is recommended to unveil the psycho-social nexus of risk, prevention, and intervention, and underlying socially constructed realities. It is important to give participants a voice by including them in participant-centered research that delves into their situational and environmental contexts. My study aims at providing an interpretation of social resilience in connection with young adult migrants' lived experiences, and resilience as a socially constructed, complex, and multifaceted phenomenon. Hence, this is important to conduct migrant-centered and migrant-focused research providing first-hand information about the phenomenon. In this respect, phenomenological research aims at understanding participants' lives through the prism of their experiences and the meanings they assign to those experiences (Creswell, 1998; Leedy & Ormrod, 2001). I propose research methods to investigate the lives of young adult migrants in Sweden, with the primary goal of understanding the person-environment interaction in shaping the phenomenon of social resilience. The use of a phenomenological research design and a social construc-tionist's ethnographic approach, the methodological triangulation, (which I refer to here as a 'methodological mosaic'), will provide a systematic depth of analysis with validation of findings at various stages. The ethnographic approach helps researchers to use fieldwork (comprised of participant observation, informal discussions, and interviews) as a strategy to investigate the phenomenon in its social context and natural settings through direct engagement with people. The ethnographic approach for empirical investigation also provides validation strategies, such as triangulating multiple data sources, getting thick descriptions of experience-based narratives, and the first-person point of view on socially constructed realities (Denscombe, 2007; Hammersley, 2006; Murchison, 2010).
Young adult migrants are a potential human capital for the country, and they are supposed to be developed into resources for the social and economic sustainability of society (Fangen et al., 2016). This paper presents a methodological proposal for my study of social resilience and young adult migrants' lived experiences. Following the initial literature review and the formulation/revision of the research question, I will contact non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and local municipalities in four selected cities in the south of Sweden that have received the most migrants during the last ten years. Generally, there are three types of organizations that work for migrants: religious organizations (such as church), civil society organizations, and local municipalities. These NGOs and local municipalities will serve as gate openers for my study, and I will be able to participate in activities for migrants (such as language cafes). This participation will assist to identify and contact individuals. The participants are young adult migrants (19 to 25 years old) who have lived in Sweden for at least two years.
The first step in gaining access to the participants is to do fieldwork. Figure 2 shows the planned research process.
Fieldwork and Participant Observation
During fieldwork, researchers are "more or less contemporaneous with the events, experience, and interactions they describe or recount" (Emerson et al., 2001:353). The fieldwork sets the stage for creating trusted connections (between the researcher and participants), identifying potential participants, understanding contextual dimensions of the data, and enhancing the quality of the research through accuracy and consistency in descriptions of the narratives and experiences (Qamar, 2021). The primary objective of the fieldwork in this project is to get access to the participants and explore the activities organized by the organizations working with migrants. In Sweden, different NGOs collaborate with local communes to organize activities for migrants, such as language learning, social meetings, and sports activities. Migrants from different ethnic backgrounds and age groups
Figure 2
The Proposed Research Process to Explore Young Adult Migrants' Lived Experiences
attend these activities. Recently I have initiated contacts with local municipalities and NGOs (including the church) to make connections, visited a sports organization that organizes activities for migrants, and also attended a language cafe and a children's outdoor activity organized by the sports organization in collaboration with the local municipality. Now there are plans to extend my connections across organizations and municipalities to conduct fieldwork with participant observation. Being with the social workers on site, and spending time with the migrants during activities will enable the description of the activities, their purpose, and how they may help the migrant families.
Hence, the fieldwork will include onsite visits to have a keen observation of activities organized by social workers. Being a participant observer, I intend to get an insight into the activities, social interactions, and an understanding of the migrants' needs and corresponding strategies and solutions offered by the social workers. As most of the activities are done once a week (such as a church café, a language café, etc.), and other events (organized for migrants) are scheduled differently, the fieldwork will suffice the purpose to record the observations (field notes) of the activities and events in all four municipalities. These field notes will provide a descriptive record of the physical settings, social interactions, activities, and casual conversations. I will also use these field notes to add supplementary information obtained from the social workers and migrants present in these activities. The field visits will allow for casual talks and identifying potential participants for interviews. This is useful for establishing rapport and trust to obtain informed consent for a participation in the study.
My methodological mosaic will include the data collection methods listed below (Figure 3).
Figure 3
A Methodological Mosaic to Explore Young Adult Migrants' Lived Experiences
Resilience Diaries
Resilience diaries can provide a snapshot of the participant's perceptions and experiences related to the challenges they face and resolve. The diary is a journal of events and activities that the diary writers consider relevant to their lives for some specific reason (Rokkan et al., 2015). Diary writing is used as an interpretative testing method in educational research (Engin, 2011; Sa, 2002), and as a child-friendly testing method in child research (Lamsa et al., 2012; Punch, 2002). Diary writing is a 'participant-friendly' research method that allows participants the freedom, time, and space to describe their activities, memories, and plans. It implies a commitment to document a phenomenon, incident, or event in one's life. It is important to give participants a clear goal and guidelines to write the diary. In this research, participants who are willing to write a diary are asked to write about the incident/s they experience in their lives as migrants reporting challenges they face and their coping strategies. Participants are given one month to keep a diary without any restriction on the length of the information they want to write. Once during the month, they are contacted briefly for a follow-up. They are asked to write their stories in response to the following questions:
• Describe the incident/challenging situation you want to share (what happened). Try to recall the time, date, location, and situation as best as you can.
• What were the immediate thoughts and feelings you had when you faced the situation or encountered the problem for the first time?
• What were your major concerns and worries at that time?
• How did you manage and deal with the problem?
• What did you learn that will help you to deal with a similar situation in the future?
These specific questions help individuals organize their memories and compose their writing. It is also useful for the researcher to read and reflect on the content. These diaries that I refer to as 'resilience diaries' are similar to solicited diaries in which people are requested to write for specific reasons (Milligan & Bartlett, 2019). Participants who are reluctant to be interviewed will feel comfortable writing a resilience diary. Another advantage is gaining an understanding of the data and preparing for the interviews that will be conducted following the reflective thematic analysis of the resilience diaries.
After the diaries are collected, a reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019) of the content of the diaries will be performed using the above-mentioned questions to reflect upon the content of the diaries. The reflexive thematic analysis provides the theoretical flexibility to identify and analyze patterns in the data. The description of the themes that have emerged from the data provides useful information related to the challenges faced and resolved. This information will be used to prepare guidelines for conducting biographical interviews. Hence, this first phase of data collection and data analysis will also benefit as a pilot study.
Biographical Interviews
Life stories can inform us on how people make sense of the world they interact with and experience. Following interpretive traditions in qualitative research, Schütze's biographical method is considered effective for its reflexivity in exploring specific experiences in the context of challenges and changes that shape people's lives. A biographical interview provides the life stories of participants in their own words and according to their deeper understanding of lived experiences (Schütze, 1992a, 1992b; Szczepanik & Siebert, 2016; Treichel & Schwelling, 2006). Hence, in my study of young adult migrants' lives, unstructured narrative interviews will benefit the reconstruction of migrants' stories into experience narratives. Without using structured questions to restrict the openness of experience and perceptions, a W3H (What, When, Why, and How) approach will be used to ask probing questions during the interview to gain a textural (what is experienced) and structural (how it is experienced) description of lived experiences. The phe-nomenological analysis of the interview data will be used to search for meaning and meaning-making in the data, cross-cutting themes, and comprehensive knowledge of various interconnected aspects of social resilience used to search for meaning and meaning-making in the data, cross-cutting themes, and comprehensive knowledge of various interconnected aspects of social resilience.
In the south of Sweden, migrants are predominantly from Arab countries (Arabic speaking) followed by migrants from Iran and Afghanistan (Dari or Persian speaking). Young adult migrants who have lived in Sweden for more than four years also speak Svenska (Swedish language). As I am not an expert in these languages, I will seek help from interpreters who can speak the migrants' language and the English language.
Expert Conferencing
After synthesizing the findings from resilience diaries and interviews, a discussion guide will be prepared including thematic illustrations of the findings corresponding to the research question. To discuss the findings, a focus group with qualitative researchers and academic professionals (working in migration studies) will be conducted. The focus group participants will include researchers (studying migrants in Sweden) and the professionals from social work organizations (in Sweden). The participants will be accessed through organizations (academia and social work organizations), and connections established during the research and fieldwork will be used.
This focus group is referred to as 'expert conferencing' to fulfill two important objectives in this methodological mosaic. First, it will be useful to validate the findings of the study while receiving experts' reflections. Second, experts' comments, debates, and consensus will be used to prepare a draft for the workshop activities to be organized for the participants. To achieve these objectives, the discussion guide will be provided to the participants at least two weeks before the focus group discussion. The discussion commentary will be added to the discussion guide corresponding to the thematic categories.
A Participants' Workshop
The primary objective of the workshop, in line with participatory research (Cornwall & Jewkes, 1995), is to engage participants in group activities, such as addressing given situations relevant to the problems migrants encounter while exchanging knowledge and experience. The data collected in previous phases of this research plan and expert conferencing (Figure 3) will provide the content for the workshop activities. The session will be open to all participants (including those who have already participated in this research). In this format, workshop participants are considered as co-researchers, with the researcher acting only as a moderator. The data collected during the workshop is comprised of the responses of various groups of participants to the given scenarios, which will be analyzed to identify a pattern of situational problem-solving and conscious awareness of environmental barriers and supports that contribute to the process of social resilience. The content of the workshop will include the participants' perceptions about the given problems, their approaches to solving the problems, the sources of information that they will use, and the way they plan their interactions with other actors (including social workers, local community, migrants, and officials). Interpreters will help to engage the participants in the workshop activities.
A Focus Group with Social Workers
To gain a 'from above' perspective on the challenges that young adult migrants face in Sweden, it is imperative to analyze how social workers (who deal with migrants in support activities) interpret those challenges. After collecting all of the above-mentioned ground-up data, a focus group guide for social workers will be developed. This guide will be used to explore the lives of young adult migrants in Sweden in the context of environmental factors and their impact on the social resilience process. Participants in the focus group will be recruited through NGOs and local communes where they operate as social workers. The information in this dataset will contribute to the depth and rigor of the findings because of their first-hand working experience with migrants. Themes describing social workers' perceptions of young adult migrants' lives and the process of social resilience will be explored using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019) of focus group data.
The Methodological Mosaic
The mosaic approach in research provides flexibility to use multiple methods, recognition of participants' voices, and reflexive thinking to interpret findings (Clark, 2017). In the context of young adult migrants' lives in a host country, the lived experiences are marked by complex transitions from vulnerability to stability. A methodological mosaic that involves multiple data sources and qualitative analysis helps researchers to contextualize findings and provide a comprehensive and coherent interpretation of the phenomenon. All different pieces of data collected through field notes, resilience diaries, biographical interviews, expert conferencing,
participants' workshops, and the focus group with social workers (Figures 2 and 3) provide a mosaic to synthesize and interpret the pathways of social resilience from risk exposure and perception to stability and integration. The coherent approach to design and connect each piece of this mosaic provides data sources and data analysis triangulation strengthening and grounding the findings of the qualitative research in the context. The significance of this methodological mosaic in exploring the lives of young adult migrants lies in the richness of data, the thickness of description, and the coherence of interpretation.
Challenges in the Realisation of the Plan
The multimethod approach in this research plan is itself a strength of the research plan concerning validation, accuracy, consistency, and trustworthiness of the research; however, certain challenges need to be addressed. The first challenge is the access to participants that requires an extended network of social connections with organizations and municipalities. According to my recent experience, while initiating contacts with local organizations, 'snowballing' was found to be a helpful strategy to extend connections across different organizations in different cities. For this purpose, colleagues at universities are being contacted as well as other researchers who have recently worked in this direction. They may help reach other people and organizations.
The second challenge is related to the migrants' language. As mentioned earlier, the majority of migrants speak Arabic, Dari, and Persian, and interpreters will be helpful to interact with the participants. However, it does not mean that migrants from African countries (who cannot speak Arabic) can be engaged. Hence, the research will be mainly focused on migrants who can speak a language of the majority of migrants. This is a limitation of my research.
The third challenge is related to the data analysis approach. With different types of data sets, I should proceed with the relevant type of data analysis. In this case, thematic analysis for resilience diaries and focus group interviews will be used. However, in-depth interviews are mainly based on a phenomenological investigation of lived experiences. Hence, the interpretive phenomenological analysis will be used to explore individual experiences and life stories. Field notes will be used as a descriptive support to contextualize and interpret the findings, whereas the workshop content will be analyzed using descriptive qualitative analysis to understand the participants' approach to social resilience in certain situations. Overall, it is challenging to bring these pieces together to form a mosaic; however, different but relevant types of analysis of the data sets will be helpful to find patterns across the data sets that can determine the characteristics of the social resilience phenomenon and the role of person-environment interaction and social experiences in enhancing the phenomenon.
Conclusions
In recent years, the debates on migrants' welfare, their role in country development, and a socially sustainable society have gained significance. The planned study
will contribute to rare bottom-up qualitative research with an emphasis on the social dimension of resilience using experiential knowledge and in-depth phenomenological insight. The young adult migrants are full of potential, and their diversities add to their capacity to contribute to the human and social capital of a host country. While their visibility and contribution to the socio-economic development are relevant to the needs of the emerging multicultural Swedish society, there is a need to investigate the quality of their social experiences and interactions. This research plan will also enhance social and educational institutions' research and practice by providing them with voices of young adult migrants and social workers as well as a phenomenological understanding of social resilience. The concept of using a methodological mosaic in social resilience and migration studies provides a solid foundation for conducting multidisciplinary social science research. It also gives the freedom to engage experts from various disciplinary backgrounds and benefits from diverse perspectives to connect the methodological pieces. Furthermore, the findings of interdisciplinary qualitative investigations using methodological mosaics may give an appropriate framework for quantitative researchers to hypothesize their top-down studies close to the context. The potential findings of this study will be useful for researchers, educators, counselors, social workers, and policymakers. The proposed methodological mosaic can be useful to conduct phenomenological studies in behavioral sciences investigating marginalized individuals or communities.
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