The resilience of seven Hmong refugee women as told in story and Paj Ntaub story cloth
Author(s):
Hales, Susan
Format:
Thesis
Degree granted:
Ph.D.
Publisher:
Ann Arbor : Gonzaga University, 2003.
Pages:
194
Language:
English
Abstract:
The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of the meaning of resilience and the supports that foster resilience from the perspectives of Hmong refugee women in resettlement. To learn how they would describe their strength, its sources, and its supports, a tailored hermeneutic phenomenology was used to obtain primary data through in-depth, life history interviews, and researcher reflections. A purposive, non-probability sampling technique employed the following selection criteria: life experience (a) in Laos until age eight or more, (b) of escape across the Mekong River, (c) in a refugee camp in Thailand, and (d) of resettlement in the United States. Life histories and emic definitions for strength were gathered from interview sessions with the Hmong women, plus one women's authentic text. A tailored research design used Hmong pictorial story cloths to facilitate the participants' narrative accounts of their lived experience. The analytical process was based on an adaptation of the methodologies of Colaissi, Stevick, Keen, and Van Kaam, described by Moustakas (1994). The data were reduced and meaning units delineated to discover themes, which were validated and synthesized. This process allowed for a structured, systematic, and compassionate analysis of the narratives and resulted in a composite, textural description of the meaning of resilience to the participants. Patience, as emically defined, emerged as the definitive characteristic of strong Hmong women, and as a source of their strength. “Helping each other,” or reciprocity and interdependence, was identified by one woman as the source of strength in family and community, an assertion borne out in the others' life history interviews. Telling the story verbally and in paj ntaub story cloth artworks emerged as a means to and a characteristic of the strength of the Hmong as a cultural group. Researcher reciprocity included the production of individual biographical accounts as small books for the women participants and financial support for the women's production of paj ntaub story cloths of their life stories. Photographs of these paj ntaub story cloths are included in the dissertation; the story cloths belong to the women in the study.