The MBB Lunch Series is free and open to the Harvard community

Trauma, Resilience, and Mental Health in Conflict Settings: Findings from South Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of Congo
Manasi Sharma
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and Brigham and Women's Hospital

The study of psychological trauma in humanitarian settings has consistently revealed the negative mental health impact of exposure to war atrocities, especially high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder. However, there is little consensus on what is meant by war trauma, how it should be measured, how ‘levels’ of trauma vary across sociodemographic groups, what individual narratives tell us about culture-specific conceptualizations of adversity, and how these experiences interacts with other factors to influence long-term risk and resilience in conflict settings.

I will present findings from my mixed-methods research examining war-related trauma in internally displaced civilians and combatants across four conflict-affected countries in Sub-Saharan Africa: South Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Overall, my findings highlight the role of robust measurement and survey methods as well as the cultural richness of qualitative research in contextualizing war-related adversities and their impact on health, security, and peacebuilding activities in humanitarian emergencies. My research aims to provide the first critical step in the design of appropriate measures and targeted psychosocial interventions in conflict-affected settings, with the goal of helping policymakers incorporate local priorities into national programs.

Deliberation vs. Q&A: Focused questioning outperforms deliberation for increasing knowledge and sophistication
Chris Celaya
Graduate Student, Government

Proponents of Deliberative Democracy (DD) applaud its ability to support informed, sophisticated, and confident decision-making. However, Deliberative Democracy has a lot of moving parts, and efforts to pin down which part of DD leads to these outcomes are rare and inconclusive. Deliberative Democracy includes large sunk costs for participants in both time and effort, monitoring by others when decision-making occurs, a particular way of structuring information, a particular arrangement of participants relative to each other, etc.  Any one of these components of DD might be responsible for increases in knowledge, sophistication, and confidence that result from a deliberative program. In this project I design an experiment with as valid a control group as possible for a deliberative conversation – a Question and Answer session (Q&A) – to best control for all these variables while varying deliberation. This allows me to test whether the deliberation itself is responsible for the observed changes in knowledge, sophistication, and confidence, or whether some other factor might be doing most of the work.  This study suggests the latter; that Q&A outperforms deliberation in increasing political knowledge, sophistication, and efficacy, and that both outperform an information-packet control-group in knowledge and sophistication gains. These results provide guidance for researchers and social engineers seeking to inform or motivate the public, especially when efficiency is a priority.