Perceived Stress, Coping, and Resilience of Ethiopian Women Labor Migrant Returnees from the Middle East Countries
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2015-01
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Addis Ababa University
Abstract
From a life span development perspective, migration is a non-normative life transition,
requiring extensive adaptation. Ethiopian women labor migrants to the Middle Eastern
countries remain among the most vulnerable of all migrant populations. Researchers often
noted this vulnerable situation of the women. Empirical literature on women labor migrants
has long been dominated by research that focuses on the negative aspects, such as their
vulnerability to economic, sexual exploitation, and psychopathology. There is lack of research
that focuses on supporting and empowering these women. There is a new interest in
identifying migrants' resistance resources that promote healthy psychological functioning.
This study aims to assess and describe women labor migrants’ perceived level of stress due to
their migration experiences, explore their migration experiences that were potential sources of
stress, uncover the salient coping strategies they employed to deal with stress, assess and
describe the level of resilience of the women, identify the positive migration experiences and
inner positive personal capacities that reinforced their resilience during their stay abroad, and
examine the associations among the variables. The study was based on the experiences of
returnee women. The study employed a mixed methods approach to data collection and
analysis. A non-probabilistic sample of 118 women returnees responded to a survey
administered in the quantitative approach of the research. In the qualitative approach, in order
to contextualize and add depth to the data gathered through the quantitative survey, semi-
structured interviews were conducted with a sub-sample of 11 women who had taken part in
the survey. The major findings emanating from this study were: (1) the majority of the
participants experienced moderate to high levels of perceived stress. The major sources of
their stress were: personal experiences of social isolation, exploitative working conditions,
language barrier, separation from family and lack of communication, their undocumented
legal status, and breakup of important long-term relationships. (2) Following distressing life
experiences in the host countries, participants engaged in determined efforts to cope with
stressors and developed their own coping strategies. The most frequently employed coping
strategies were: use of emotional social support, use of instrumental/informational social
support, religious coping, focusing on the positives, and active coping (taking direct action to
a problem). (3) Despite all the hardships they experienced, many of the participants displayed
resilience and developed competencies in acculturating themselves to a new environment,
minimizing the impact of consequent psychological distress. The majority of the women were
found to have high resilience levels. During their stay abroad, they derived significant
strength from external as well as internal (personal) sources. (4) High-resilient women labor
migrants had significantly lower levels of perceived stress than low-resilient migrants. This is
because high level of resilience does seem to significantly increase the use of adaptive coping
strategies. (5) Being a migrant of rural origin, being undocumented migrant, and having low
educational status were related to increases in perceived stress among the women. Having
better educational status was found to have a potential link with empowerment and resilience.
Overall, the results demonstrated that while there were stressors common across participants,
there were unique personal and situational circumstances that could mediate the impact of a
stressor. This study can be seen as an inquiry where the strengths were discovered and
appreciated, in addition to their challenges. Implications for practice and for further research,
emerged from this study, are discussed
Description
Keywords
Middle east countries