Children's drawings as a triage tool for the assessment of negative emotionality in refugee children

Abstract

The study sought to examine the possible indirect trauma indicators among refugee children's drawings. We have analyzed drawings of refugee children and non-refugee children as controls (5 - 9 years old). The content and Pickard's expressive strategies for mood depiction were analyzed on 464 drawings. The content analysis revealed different content-specific categories across groups, with the category of Violence/War appearing significantly more in the drawings of the refugee group. and being used as one of the trauma indicators. The analysis revealed that negative mood was depicted by more complex and detailed drawings in both groups. An expressive strategy, namely the literal strategy, appeared to be specific to the refugee group only (e.g., absence of facial characteristics), while different patterns of non-literal expressive strategies were observed in conveying mood between the two groups. Our findings suggest that the drawings can be used as a triage tool to assess the emotional status of refugee children.