A Conceptual Framework for Research and Practice

The lives of refugees, like others, are constructed in broad and multiple contexts. For refugees, these contexts include the family, neighborhood, and community in the part of the world from which they immigrated and those same broad groupings in the new host society. The experiences and perceptions of refugees are shaped by the opportunities, limitations, possibilities, and constraints that are naturally available in all of these milieus. Our conceptual framework for the study of Bosnian refugees draws on a number of models. These include an ecosystems perspective for refugee populations, a framework that lays out the stages of refugee experience, and an acculturation model for refugee adaptation.We also discuss the resettlement experience as the product of the interaction of the human and social capital that refugees bring to a new culture with the characteristics of the host society. We propose an ecosystems model of refugee resettlement as our theoretical framework for this volume.