Post-traumatic stress disorder, psychological resilience and religious coping among Palestinian refugees in Lebanon

Lebanon is one of the regions where Palestinians migrated after the Israeli-Palestinian war. It is considered to be an important need to conduct scientific research on this remarkable group of people who face many difficult situations such as migration and war. In this context, this study, which was conducted to observe the psychological changes in Palestinians after the traumatic events they were exposed to, aims to determine the levels of post-traumatic stress disorder, psychological resilience and religious coping of Palestinian refugees who migrated to Lebanon and reside in different camps here. In the study, a total of 511 individuals living in different camps in Lebanon, including 257 women and 254 men, aged 18 and over, were reached. In this quantitative study, Personal Information Form, Traumatic Events List, Psychological Scale of Islamic Religiosity (PMIR), Harvard Trauma Inventory (HTI) and Connor-Davidson Psychological Resilience Scale (CD-PBS) were applied to the participants. In this study, independent simple t-test, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Pearson correlation coefficient were used to analyze the data. As a result of the analyses, the mean Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) scores of women were found to be higher than the mean PTSD scores of men. Similarly, the mean positive religious coping scores of men were higher than the mean positive religious coping scores of women. With the increase in age, a decrease in the PTSD level of the participants was observed. The data obtained in the study reveals that there is a significant negative relationship between PTSD and positive religious coping levels of the participants, while there is a significant positive relationship with negative religious coping and religious conflict. In addition, there was a significant relationship between PTSD and psychological resilience. There was no significant relationship between psychological resilience and positive religious coping, but there was a significant relationship with negative religious coping and religious conflict.