Psychological evaluation of refugee children: contrasting results from play diagnosis and parental interviews.

Many refugee families from Bosnia and Herzegovina arrived in Sweden during the Balkan conflict in the 1990s. We studied 14 of these families to compare psychological evaluation of the children using two different methods. We first carried out a semi-structured interview of a parent or parents in each family. The symptoms of each of the children, who ranged in age from 5 to 12 years, were evaluated based on these interview results. Then a second method, the Erica play-diagnosis method, was used to study the inner thoughts and feelings of the children. Results from the Erica play-diagnosis method were compared with results from Erica play- diagnosis from a normal group. According to results from the parental interviews all but one child in this study had a low level of psychological symptoms. In contrast, results from Erica play-diagnosis of these children showed that there were higher frequencies of not-normal play in these children compared with those in the normal group, which is an indication of deficiencies in the psychological well-being of these children. The results emphasise the importance of getting diagnostic information from the child in order to understand each child's psychological condition.