Quality of life of Syrian refugees living in camps in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Global Health, Psychiatry and Psychology, Public Health
- Keywords
- Quality of Life, Refugees, Psychological, Physical, Environment, Social
- Copyright
- © 2014 Aziz et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. Quality of life of Syrian refugees living in camps in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e467v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.467v1
Abstract
The current study explores the perceived quality of life of Syrian refugees who have entered the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Two hundred and seventy participants residing in refugee camps in the Erbil region in Kurdistan completed the WHOQOL-BREF, which measures quality of life (QoL) within four domains; physical, psychological, social relationships and environment. Syrian refugees in Kurdistan scored significantly lower for general population norms on physical health, psychological and environment QoL, and score significantly lower for physical health and psychological QOL for refugees in the Gaza strip. However, respondents in the current sample scored significantly higher on environment QoL to refugees in the Gaza strip, and significantly higher on all the QoL domains than those reported for refugees in West Africa. Finally, Syrian refugees in Kurdistan scored significantly higher than general population norms for environment-related QoL. The current findings provide the first report of QoL domain scores among Syrian refugees, and position the QoL scores among this sample, for the most part, within the range mean scores for QoL domains of other samples, and may, for environment-related QoL, be higher than for other refugee samples.