‘Better than a pill’: digital storytelling as a narrative process for refugee women

ABSTRACT

Digital storytelling is a valuable and ethical research tool to engage in collaborative research with refugee women. This paper recounts how digital storytelling was used in a mixed-methods study on settlement, to document the journeys of women who entered Australia through the Woman at Risk program in 2014–2015. Instead of merely asking a series of questions, the digital storytelling process extended our qualitative inquiry as an approach that valued the women’s own memories, interests, and hopes. The methodology represents a meaningful way of engaging in collaborative research, where participating women were not just storytellers but valued as active co-constructors of new knowledge. We outline each of three digital narratives as a ‘whole’ to consider what we can learn from a storytelling process where women with complex circumstances are privileged as protagonists-and-producers of their own stories. We argue that it is worth critically reflecting on the concepts the women propose for themselves as meaningful ways to articulate their lives, when we relinquish the researcher role as question asker to enter a space alongside participants and listen intently. Our paper highlights the broader potential of digital storytelling particularly in mental health research in collaboration with refugee participants.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital storytelling
• refugee women
• settlement
• narrative
• Women at Risk

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to the women who participated in this research for their generosity in sharing their stories, and to Louise Farrell and Elena Volkova for their involvement in the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Caroline Lenette is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences and a founding member of the Forced Migration Research Network at The University of New South Wales, Sydney. She collaborates with resettled refugee women using visual ethnographic methods to convey their experiences of mental health and well-being.

Mark Brough is a social anthropologist specialising in public health research at the Queensland University of Technology. His work is predominantly concerned with addressing the health inequalities faced by people from refugee backgrounds and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Robert Schweitzer is Professor of Psychology at the Queensland University of Technology. His research centres upon refugee well-being, psychotherapy process and outcome, and the application of phenomenology in psychological research.

Ignacio Correa-Velez is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Health, Queensland University of Technology. His research interests include refugee health, settlement and integration, and mental health.

Kate Murray is a Senior Lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology. Her research interests include refugee and immigrant health, acculturation, and the cultural adaptation of evidence-based interventions for diverse populations.

Lyn Vromans is a Psychologist and Research Fellow in the School of Psychology and Counselling at the Queensland University of Technology. Her research interests include cross-cultural and refugee loss and mental health and narrative interventions.

ORCID

Caroline Lenette http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2317-0438

Robert D. Schweitzer http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9915-0786

Kate Murray http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9935-8170

Lyn Vromans http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3847-7018

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [grant number LP140100609].