The project is a direct follow-up to the research project Psychosocial Needs of Former ISIS Child Soldiers in Northern Iraq (I). The main goal is to develop and submit a larger application for external funding in order to further develop collaborative storytelling as a method of psychosocial work with former child soldiers and to investigate its (assumed and so far unsystematically reported) health-promoting effects as well as to make the stories accessible for socio-psychological analyses and interpretations. The application will be oriented on the one hand towards evaluating the health-related impact of collaborative storytelling as a method of trauma-sensitive psychosocial work with former child soldiers in Iraq by means of a mixed methods design, and on the other hand towards an in-depth, differentiated investigation of the social participation opportunities of the former child soldiers on the basis of the stories generated. The core of the 3-year project to be applied for is the implementation of the workshops; an innovative methodological design is planned for the evaluative support, with a pre-post study to measure the health-related impact (outcome evaluation) and qualitative process evaluation by means of interviews and projective essays.
Original language: English