To Örebro University

This workshop aims to present the barriers and facilitators of conducting prevention research with youth and families from immigrant and refugee backgrounds. Conducting such research involves unique challenges, including language barriers, cultural differences, limited understanding of or different views about research, distrust, and instability in living conditions. These are just a few of the unique challenges that researchers must address to ensure the quality implementation of their research. However, there are limited resources available to guide novice researchers and practitioners in learning from the experiences of others.

Experiences from two large-scale projects in different contexts, Germany and Sweden, will form the basis of this workshop. We will present the strategies that were effective in achieving the project goals, as well as the failures and lessons learned. The facilitators include senior researchers, a doctoral student, project assistants who worked on project administration and data collection, and intervention leaders who ran intervention sessions with the participants. Workshop participants will have the opportunity to interact with both senior and junior research staff, who will share firsthand experiences from different phases of project development, implementation, and dissemination.

Overall, this workshop is designed to empower novice researchers and practitioners by enhancing their understanding of the challenges, barriers, and facilitators of conducting prevention research with youth and families from immigrant and refugee backgrounds. The program will include interactive group activities to provide hands-on experiences for the participants.