Role Adjustment in Southeast Asian Refugee Families

Abstract

Little is known about the relationship between family history and family identity. One way to initially explore whether or how families incorporate their history into the development of their identity would be to talk to members of families who have had a discrete event in their history. Refugee families are such families. Seventeen members from ten refugee families who fled Cambodia or Vietnam and resettled in the United States between 1975 and 1990, were interviewed about their perceptions of how their experience affected ·their family identity. Transcripts were qualitatively analyzed. The findings presented here are limited to descriptions of adjustment that occurred in family roles.