Co-Designing Technology-enabled Support for Unaccompanied Migrant Youth’s Social Ecology

Promoting Resilience in Unaccompanied Migrant Youth by Supporting their Supporters

This UX research study was conducted as part of my PhD research and a four-year Innovation Training Network (ITN) – Technology-Enabled Mental Health for Young People (TEAM) funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (MSCA) initiative. This training network focuses on different challenges of technology-enabled mental health services for young people. My PhD research focused on vulnerable groups among young people, particularly migrant youth who arrive in the EU unaccompanied by a responsible adult or who are left unaccompanied after their arrival.
Due to the high number of refugees arriving in Vienna in 2015, the PhD project was located in Vienna, Austria.

High Need of Resilience Support in the Everyday Context of Unaccompanied Migrant Youth

Unaccompanied migrant youth are exposed to many mental health risks (Höhne, van der Meer, Kamp-Becker, & Christiansen, 2020; Hodes, Jagdev, Chandra, & Cunni, 2008), and even after arriving in the country of destination, they experience many stresses such as continued unstable educational and living situation (Hodes & Vostanis, 2019) and discrimination (Fazel & Betancourt, 2018). Unaccompanied migrant youth could benefit from developing strong psychological resilience to adapt to this adverse situation, which, in turn, could prevent the onset of mental illnesses (Zolkoski & Bullock, 2012).

Recent studies showed that social contacts and relationships play a key role in promoting resilience in UMY (Horlings & Hein, 2018; Rodriguez & Dobler, 2021; Scharpf, Kaltenbach, Nickerson, & Hecker, 2021). In the research field of Human-Computer-Interaction, there is an increasing interest in the potential role of technology in supporting informal caregivers (Ammari & Schoenebeck, 2015; Lederman et al., 2019; Yamashita, Kuzuoka, Hirata, & Kudo, 2013; Yamashita et al., 2018).

Thus, this UX research project explored the potential pathways and possibilities for technology-enabled resilience support as part of unaccompanied migrant youth’s everyday life and social-ecological context.

Aim: Exploring Potentials for Technology-Enabled Support

The following aims guide the UX research project:

Gaining an understanding of unaccompanied migrant youth’s everyday life and of their supporters‘ practices & challenges
Mapping out technological interventions points to enabled resilience support in the context of unaccompanied migrant youth
Exploring the design opportunities and requirements of technology-enabled support for supporting unaccompanied migrant youth through supporting their mentors

UX Research Methods

Semi-structured Interviews
Co-Design Workshop
Thematic Analysis
Mind Mapping Activities
Ideation Methods
Development of A Design Framework
Conceptualization of Design Examples

Software

Dedoose - a Web-Based Application for Qualitative Analysis
MAXQDA - Software for Qualitative Analysis
XMind - Mind Mapping Software
InDesign
Photoshop
Premiere Pro

UX Research Process

Semi-structured Interviews with Unaccompanied Migrant Youth and Their Professional and Volunteer Support Workers

To gain a first understanding of the everyday context of unaccompanied migrant youth, I interviewed:

5 unaccompanied migrant youth,
6 social workers,
4 teachers,
3 mental health experts,
3 mentoring program coordinators, and
3 volunteers acting as mentors.

Analyzes of the Interview Data

Thematic Analysis by Braun and Clarke
Mind Mapping activities inspired by Work Models by Beyer and Holtzblatt

I mapped the way how different support groups promote resilience in unaccompanied migrant youths to unaccompanied migrant youths‘ stressors and to the five attributes of a resilient child by Bernard (1993, 1995).

As part of the analysis, I map the individual attributes of a resilient child to UMY's stressors and how different support groups promote resilience in UMY. Practitioners include all social workers and teachers. Person of trust includes mentors.

Main Findings

Unaccompanied migrant youths have to deal with many external and internal stressors that are caused by the political situation
Political regulations hamper unaccompanied migrant youths from following their preferred coping strategies and thus coping with their stressors
An ecology of adult support workers plays an essential role in promoting resilience in unaccompanied migrant youths but faces many barriers (e.g., lack of resources, network-related challenges) caused by constraining political regulations.
Especially mentors are the contacts with whom the unaccompanied migrant youths mainly discuss their problems after building trust and overcoming the barrier of mental health stigma; however, mentors need more support in providing mental health support as interviewed mentors indicated that they felt overwhelmed by this role.

The map of the social-ecological context showing pathways for technology- enabled resilience support

Potential Pathways for Technology-enabled Resilience Support

Through the mapping process and analysis, I identified potential areas where more support is needed and thus potential pathways for integrating technology-enabled resilience support:

(α) Providing resources supporting unaccompanied migrant youths in coping with their situation that does not cause additional stress and pressure on the UMY.
(β) Supporting mentors in providing support.
(γ 1) Creating more beneficial exchanges with peers.
(γ 2) Supporting professional support workers in providing long-term and individual support.

Co-Design Workshops with 8 Mentors and 1 Social Worker

I conducted co-design workshops to further explore how to design for pathway (β) Supporting mentors in providing support.

Developing a Guidebook for New Mentors

The co-design workshops with mentors were framed as being about developing a guidebook for new mentors to provide a constructive, forward-looking way to enable them to articulate and capture support approaches that they found to be successful. This explorative approach aimed to connect with the mentors’ intrinsic “volunteer” motivation to help shift discussions from problems to potential solutions.

The co-design workshops occurred over three sessions on separate days:

Session: Getting an overview and collecting and grouping advice
Session: Deepening advice
Session: Finalizing guidebook: editing and annotating chapters

A Guidebook for New Mentors

The guidebook chapters were oriented towards the categories of mentors’ advice. The final version was printed and shared with a local mentoring program and is now used by the program coordinators as part of the offered training and meet-ups.

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Analyzes

I conducted thematic analysis by Braun and Clarke and continued mapping out the social-ecological systems of UMY and mentors, their interplay, and how technology could support this interplay in order to support promoting resilience in unaccompanied migrant youths.

Key Findings of the Co-Design Workshops

Mentors struggle with dealing with their expectations.
Mentors have challenges regarding providing direct mental health support to their mentees (e.g., reading symptoms, discussing mental health).
The quality of coordinating care influences mentors‘ ability to provide support.
Building networks and exchanging information and resources between mentors and experts support overcoming challenges.

Design Framework and Design Directions

Pathways for technology-enabled support for mentors to provide support:

β 1: Facilitate Navigating Resources
e.g., resource sharing platform, updated and organized by exo-system (mentors, program coordinators, and experts)

β 2: Facilitate Applying Resources
e.g., game played by mentor and mentee to overcome mental health stigma and develop a language to talk about mental health problems

β 3: Coordinate Care of the Same UMY
e.g., communication tool including all professional and volunteer support workers

β 4: Strengthen the Exchange with Peers and Experts
e.g., technological infrastructure to organize online and offline synchronous and asynchronous exchange with peers and providing the option to easily contact experts

β 5: Sustain the Individual’s Capacity and Well-Being
e.g., technology could provide venting space and encourage a reflective practice through private blog posts; Peer support platforms for mentors could include technological features to distribute the workload among mentors;

Social-ecological design framework focusing on the mentor-mentee relationship and associated support systems. Points β 1-5 pinpoint potential pathways for technological interventions.