Personal future of internally displaced persons: strategies of construction
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Abstract
Relevance. The problem of forced displacement is relevant today. Since the beginning of the war in 2014, the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Ukraine has been about 1.5 million, and now, due to the full-scale invasion, this figure is constantly increasing. The psychological traumatization of IDPs and the forced nature of resettlement has drawn the attention of researchers and psychologists to providing psychological assistance to IDPs and their adaptation to life in a new place. Since IDPs construct their further life looking directed to the future, it is advisable to consider the characteristics of this future and some strategies IDPs can use to create it.
The article aims to identify the characteristics of IDPs' future and their strategies to construct it.
The research methodology is based on a comparative analysis of written narratives about the future of IDPs and residents.
The results of the study of narratives of internally displaced persons revealed the emotional valence of their attitude to the future, the complexity of their vision of the future, and the level of achievability of this future described in the authors' stories. The author has identified some strategies for constructing personal futures used by IDPs.
Conclusions and prospects for further research. It has been found that IDPs create stories about their future with more negative emotional valence than people with no forced displacement experience do. The vision of IDPs' future is relatively less elaborate and more abstract. The difference in using strategies for constructing the future by internally displaced persons and residents is that avoiding the future is more common in IDPs' narratives. Also, IDPs are more likely to use a variant of the social construction of the future, emphasizing caring for significant others.
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