The word “refugee” does not necessarily summon the same mental picture for children who encounter forced migration from different sides of the experience. New research from Türkiye suggests that local and forcibly displaced students can attach sharply different meanings to the same concept, even while sharing the same school environment.
A peer-reviewed study published in BMC Psychology on 25 September 2026 examined how 307 students aged 10 to 15 in Samsun, Türkiye, conceptualised the word “refugee”. Rather than asking students to rate a fixed list of attitudes, the researchers used a word association task designed to reveal the ideas that came to mind spontaneously.
The contrast was striking. Turkish students’ associations placed considerable weight on security, threat, countries and geography, and themes involving blame, negative perceptions and othering. Yet their responses were not uniformly hostile. Positive attributes, sadness and compassion also appeared, revealing a more complicated picture in which empathy existed alongside social distance and threat-related thinking.
Syrian and Iraqi students, by contrast, tended to organise the concept around the lived consequences of displacement. Poverty, survival, violence, death, physical and emotional pain, and the search for hope were more prominent in their cognitive maps. A correspondence analysis found that the thematic structure differed significantly between the Turkish group and the Syrian and Iraqi groups.
The same word, viewed from different positions
The importance of this finding is not that every Turkish, Syrian or Iraqi child thinks alike. The study does not support such a claim. Instead, it shows that group-level patterns in the associations students produced were meaningfully different.
That distinction matters because public debates about refugees often treat attitudes as a single continuum from positive to negative. A cognitive map can reveal something more textured. A child may associate refugees with danger and compassion at the same time. Another may connect refugeehood to pain but also to hope. These combinations matter for understanding how young people make sense of forced migration in schools where local and displaced students meet each other every day.
The research took place in Samsun, where the participating public schools had relatively high enrolment of forcibly displaced students. Of the 307 participants, 229 were Turkish and 78 were foreign nationals, with the latter group including Syrian and Iraqi students. This imbalance is important when interpreting the results because the host-community group was considerably larger.
How researchers mapped an idea rather than a test score
The researchers used a Word Association Test, a method intended to capture the concepts that participants connect spontaneously with a target word. This differs from a conventional questionnaire in which researchers decide in advance which attitudes should be measured and then ask participants how strongly they agree.
Students generated associations with “refugee”, after which the researchers examined the frequency of the words, organised them using cut-off points and grouped their meanings through thematic analysis. Comparative analysis was then used to examine similarities and differences between the Turkish, Syrian and Iraqi students’ conceptual structures.
This design has a useful advantage. Because the students were not simply choosing among researcher-written statements, their responses could surface ideas that a standard attitude scale might miss. At the same time, word association is not a direct measure of prejudice, trauma, political beliefs or behaviour. An association tells researchers that an idea is cognitively available, not necessarily that a student endorses it or acts on it.
Host-community students showed both distance and empathy
Among Turkish students, three clusters carried particular weight: security and threat, country and geography, and negative perception, blaming and othering. Those themes suggest that refugeehood was often understood partly as a social or public issue, rather than only as an individual human experience.
But the same students also produced associations grouped under positive perspectives and attributes, as well as sadness and compassion. That coexistence is one of the study’s most useful findings. It warns against flattening host-community attitudes into a simple label such as welcoming or hostile.
A student can absorb security-focused public narratives while still feeling sympathy for a displaced classmate. In practical terms, this means interventions designed for schools may have something to work with. Empathy does not have to be created from nothing if compassionate associations are already present alongside exclusionary ones.
For displaced students, refugeehood was closer to hardship and survival
The Syrian and Iraqi students produced a different pattern. Their associations were more strongly organised around poverty and the struggle for survival, violence and death, and physical and emotional pain. Hope also emerged as part of the conceptual structure.
This does not prove that each participant personally experienced every hardship represented in those themes. The study measured associations, not individual migration histories or clinical trauma. Still, the pattern is consistent with a perspective in which refugeehood is understood through the human consequences of displacement rather than mainly through its implications for the receiving society.
The correspondence analysis provided a quantitative check on the thematic comparison. It indicated statistically significant divergence between the Turkish group and the Syrian and Iraqi groups. In other words, the observed separation in thematic patterns was not treated merely as an impression from reading the students’ words.
Why schools may be an unusually important meeting point
Schools are one of the few institutions where children from host and displaced communities can repeatedly encounter one another under shared rules, routines and goals. That makes them a potentially powerful setting for either reinforcing social boundaries or weakening them.
The findings suggest that inclusive education cannot be reduced to placing students in the same building. If children arrive with different mental frameworks for understanding refugeehood, ordinary classroom contact may not automatically reconcile those perspectives. Teachers may need structured opportunities for perspective-taking, cooperative work and discussion that humanises migration without forcing displaced students to disclose personal experiences.
The authors argue that educational interventions should challenge stereotypical and exclusionary associations while strengthening empathy, shared human values and inclusive peer relations. The data support that recommendation as a plausible direction, but the study did not experimentally test any intervention. It therefore cannot show which classroom programme would work best, how large an effect it would have, or how long any change would last.
What the study can and cannot tell us
The study has several strengths. It directly compared young people from host and forcibly displaced groups in the same broader educational setting, used an open association method rather than relying only on predetermined survey statements, and combined frequency-based description, thematic interpretation and correspondence analysis.
Its boundaries are equally important. The sample came from public schools in one Turkish province, so the findings should not be assumed to represent all children in Türkiye, Syria, Iraq or other refugee-hosting societies. The groups were also unequal in size, with 229 Turkish students and 78 foreign-national students. Cultural background, language, age, length of residence, family migration history and local school climate could all shape the associations students produced.
Word association also captures salience rather than causation. The study cannot determine whether media narratives, family conversations, direct friendships, classroom experiences or personal displacement histories caused the observed differences. Nor can it establish that a particular association predicts discriminatory or supportive behaviour.
Those limitations do not make the mental maps uninformative. They clarify what kind of evidence this is. The research provides a snapshot of how different groups of students organise meaning around refugeehood, not a diagnostic assessment of individual attitudes.
A reminder that integration is also about meaning
Integration debates often focus on measurable outcomes such as school attendance, language proficiency, employment or housing. Those outcomes matter, but social integration also depends on how people understand one another.
This study shows that children sharing an educational environment can still approach the idea of refugeehood from markedly different cognitive positions. For many host-community students, the concept carried elements of security, geography and social judgement alongside compassion. For displaced students, it was more closely tied to survival, suffering and hope.
The practical challenge for schools is therefore not simply to erase differences in perspective. It is to create conditions in which those perspectives can be understood without allowing stereotypes or othering to harden into social boundaries. The presence of compassion in the host-community students’ responses, and hope in the displaced students’ responses, suggests that the mental landscape is not defined only by division.
Source Information
Study: “The mental map of the concept of ‘refugee’: a comparative analysis of the cognitive structures of Turkish, Syrian, and Iraqi students”
Authors: Orhan Ünal, Yıldıray Karadağ and Murat Bayram Yilar
Journal: BMC Psychology
Published: 25 September 2026
DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05688-8
Study design: Multi-stage descriptive study using a Word Association Test, descriptive frequency analysis, thematic analysis and comparative correspondence analysis among 307 students aged 10 to 15 in Samsun, Türkiye.
