Thrive will leverage the ongoing Intergenerational Study of War-Affected Youth (ISWAY) to examine the intergenerational influences of war experiences on parenting and the development of young children in a post-conflict setting. The research aims to deepen our understanding of mechanisms by which previous war experiences may affect parental and child health and developmental outcomes in a post-conflict, low-resource setting, and to investigate potential intergenerational effects of parental war experiences on parenting and family functioning.
The Thrive extension to the ISWAY study builds off a unique longitudinal cohort of war-affected youth who were first assessed in 2002 as 10-17-year-olds and have been followed up since, during four waves of data collection over 20 years. During the fourth wave of data collection in 2016-2017, the study also enrolled index participants’ intimate partners and their cohabitating children. A currently funded National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) study is following the index participants who were parents at wave four in an ongoing fifth wave of data collection, where enrolled children would now be 7-24 years old.