Waiting for kin: a longitudinal study of family reunification and refugee mental health in Germany

ABSTRACT

Involuntarily or planned – many refugees flee their home country alone, leave behind spouses and children but also siblings, parents and other family members they otherwise care for. Reunification in hosting communities is difficult, as governments limit institutional family reunifications and the individual journey of kin is dangerous and often illegal. Having family abroad is mentally distressing for refugees, as kin might not live in safety. Additionally, reuniting with family members can be a source of support in the new environment. Grounded in theories of mental distress and social support, this analysis investigates the association between family reunifications and refugee mental health in a random sample of refugees in Germany (N = 6610), the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees 2016–2018. By means of panel fixed-effect regression analysis, we observe institutionally sponsored but also individual moves of other family members. The study finds that family reunification has a positive association with refugee mental health, though not at an equally increasing rate for each additional member of the family. Gender differences show in the size of association, yet significant heterogeneous associations between refugee men and women cannot be observed. Finally, the associations are larger when only observing reunifications with the nuclear family.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• family reunification
• mental health
• social support
• gender

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all those who continuously supported the process of this study: Martin Kroh as well as Nicolas Legewie, Magdalena Krieger, Dorothee Busold-Hagenbeck, Lena Walther and other colleagues at the German Socio-Economic Panel.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We define mental health as a continuum from languishing to flourishing in congruence with Keyes (2002) and the definition of the World Health Organization (WHO 2014).

2 Despite its clarity on family unity, international law is missing a universal definition of the term ‘family’. The increasing body of academic work and many legal rulings however point to the definition of a family as the ‘nuclear’ family, meaning spouses and their children.

3 Unfortunately, the SOEP survey does not ask the exact arrival date of parents and other family members moving to Germany. We, therefore, cannot include them in the analyses as we would not know at which point in time they arrived.

4 We impute missing values by using the information on asylum status from the years before, if possible.

5 For this method, the group of those experiencing family reunification diminishes as only reunification after the first interview in 2016 count in the analysis (see Appendix Tables A7–A8).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leibniz Association (Leibniz Competition, funding line: innovative projects) [grant number K205/2016] and by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) [grant number 01UW1603AX].