The study seeks to examine coping strategies, including utilization of mental health service facilities and alternative help-seeking behaviors, among recent refugees subject to highly stressful situations. Secondarily, the study will analyze reactions of the mental health service system to the crisis situation posed by the massive influx of newcomers of different language and cultural orientations. The research design is longitudinal and comparative. It builds on surveys of 1980-81 Cuban and Haitian refugees in South Florida, interviewed in late 1983. Samples of approximately five hundred from each group were contacted originally and have been traced over time in preparation for a 1986 follow-up. The original survey gathered an extensive data set on individual backgrounds in countries of origin and various aspects of the early adaptation process. The proposed study will make use of these data as potential predictors of subsequent distress, alternative coping strategies, and use of mental health service facilities to be measured in the second survey. Samples are representative of each refugee population in the Miami SMSA and environs. The study will thus be able to offer the first authoritative portrait of the situation of these newly-arrived groups and their use of the mental health delivery system. A complementary observational study of the latter will also be conducted so as to compare individual refugee responses with reactions of professional staff. Aside from description, the study will allow tests of extant theories of help-seeking behavior with populations outside the cultural mainstream of U.S. society and the formulation of unambiguous causal models, potentially applicable to other immigrant and refugee groups.
