By Tomoki Miyaura, University of California San Diego
I started this summer expecting to find that poor children struggle more. I ended it convinced that the more interesting question is what “poor” even means when almost everyone around you is.
My project used a national school survey from Jordan, collected in 2022 and 2023, covering more than 6,000 students in grades 3 to 12. About 2,000 of them were refugee children: Syrians living inside and outside camps, and Palestinians living in long-established camps. Working with Professor Eizaburo Tanaka at the University of Tokyo, I asked a simple question. Among refugee children, does a family’s economic situation shape their mental health, even after you account for the war, loss, and violence many of them have lived through?
What the research gave me
I never met these children. I worked from San Diego with a data file, and that distance taught me something I did not expect. Every row in the dataset was a child who had answered questions about sadness, worry, and whether they had ever gone without enough food. When you spend weeks with those rows, you start to feel responsible for not getting them wrong.
My first results were a disappointment. For Syrian refugee children, the link between family wealth and mental health looked weak. It took me a while to see why. The scale I was using measures wealth by asking about cars, holidays abroad, dishwashers, and computers. More than 90 percent of refugee households had no car, no holiday, and no dishwasher. The tool was built for families in Europe and North America, and in a refugee camp it hit the floor. I had been trying to measure differences with a ruler that started too high.
The second lesson came from my mentor. Professor Tanaka told me that a good paper should prove one thing you can say in a single sentence, “a sentence that gets added to the textbook.” He also pushed me to choose the factors I adjusted for based on what we know about children’s lives, not on what made my numbers look best. When I followed that advice, one of my headline results became weaker. That was hard to accept. But it made the findings I kept far more trustworthy, and it taught me that honest research sometimes means reporting the result you hoped would turn out differently.
The theme I came back with
Here is my one sentence: even within uniform poverty, refugee children in relatively poorer households had more symptoms of depression and anxiety, regardless of trauma.
What struck me most was how small those differences were. Among refugee families, moving up one step at the very bottom of the scale usually meant one more bathroom or a computer at home. That small step was linked to a larger drop in depression scores than the same step among Jordanian children. Children in households where no one had an income from work were the most affected. Inside the refugee community, the main thing separating better-off from worse-off homes was whether a parent could work.
This connects to something I first felt in high school, when I surveyed 170 households in rural Indonesia. Poverty is not one condition. It has a texture, and the small details of it, a room to study in, a parent with a job, matter to the people living inside it.
What’s next
I presented this work at UC San Diego in early October, and I will share it again as a poster during Family Weekend and at the Tyler Center Virtual Summit in November. With Professor Tanaka, I am now revising the paper for submission to SSM – Mental Health, a public health journal, by the end of this year.
This fellowship showed me what kind of researcher I want to become: someone who takes numbers seriously because of the people behind them. I am grateful to Professor Tanaka, to the survey team in Jordan who collected these data, and above all to the students and parents who answered.
