Crises and Changes in Marital and Familial Life of Syrian Refugee Families: A Case Study in Mersin

There are over 2 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, more than any other country. The settlement conditions of Syrian refugee families have changed in the past year in response to swelling numbers of new arrivals and changing settlement patterns. Although, up until early 2013, almost all Syrian refugee families resided in camps, now almost four out of five families are sheltered in cities of Turkey. Many urban refugee families struggle to access adequate housing and services and  they mostly find employment in the informal economy, often in unacceptable conditions and for extremely low wages. Other problems of refugee families settled in cities are communication in daily life and adaptation to the community they started to live in despite many cultural differences. Being away from home, experiencing these diffuculties and facing uncertainty about the future affect Syrian refugee family members psychologically, socially, and physically. These problems also leave them particularly vulnerable in terms of familial and marital crises. In the study, the impact of these problems on familial and marital life of some Syrian refugee families that settled in Mersin, a metropolitan municipality of Turkey, will be examined on the principles of sociological biographical research. Data gathering and analysis will focus on embedding biographical self-presentations of these family members in the contexts of their familial biographies and the histories of their previous local social settings, interpreting them within these diachronic contexts.