Children’s Inner Maps of the Word Refugee Reveal a Sharp Divide Between Host and Displaced Students

Ask a child to say the first words that come to mind when they hear the term refugee, and the answers will trace the architecture of their inner world. A new study conducted in Samsun, Türkiye, and published in BMC Psychology, has done exactly that with 307 secondary school students aged 10 to 15, comparing how Turkish, Syrian, and Iraqi children mentally map one of the most consequential social concepts of our time. The findings, based on a well-established cognitive probing technique known as the Word Association Test, reveal a striking asymmetry: children from host communities frame the concept through security, threat, geography, and blame, while children who have lived through forced displacement associate it with poverty, violence, death, and physical and emotional pain, alongside a persistent search for hope.

Türkiye hosts millions of forcibly displaced people, which makes social integration a national priority rather than an abstract policy goal. Schools occupy a pivotal position in this process, because they are the primary arenas where young people from different origins encounter one another daily and where the cognitive seeds of either social cohesion or intergroup conflict are sown. Despite this, comparatively few studies have directly compared how Turkish, Syrian, and Iraqi students conceptualize the term refugee within the same educational settings. The research team, Orhan Ünal and Murat Bayram Yilar of Ondokuz Mayıs University and Yıldıray Karadağ of Süleyman Demirel University, designed their investigation precisely to fill this gap by examining the cognitive structures of children enrolled in schools with high enrolment of forcibly displaced students.

Methodologically, the study employed a multi-stage descriptive design. The Word Association Test asks participants to produce the words that a given stimulus concept evokes, and it is prized by researchers because it bypasses deliberative self-presentation and surfaces underlying perceptions and perspectives. In this study, the technique was applied to students in the 10-to-15 age bracket, a developmental window during which social attitudes are actively consolidating. The researchers then subjected the resulting word pools to descriptive analysis, determining frequency distributions and statistical cut-off points for the associated words, and to thematic analysis, which organized the semantic content of those words into coherent conceptual categories. A comparative layer of analysis then identified the similarities and differences in conceptual structures across the three participant groups, while correspondence analysis tested whether the thematic profiles of the groups differed in statistically significant ways.

The results show that for Turkish students, the themes of Security and Threat, Country and Geography, and Negative Perception, Blaming, and Othering carried substantial weight in their perceptions of refugees. In other words, the concept activated associations with borders, belonging, and perceived risk, together with attributions of fault and processes of social exclusion. These associations are characteristic of a majority group’s perspective, in which the displaced population is construed primarily as an external collective whose presence requires explanation, management, or judgment. The prominence of threat-related content in children’s mental maps is particularly noteworthy, because such cognitive structures, once entrenched, are known to predict intergroup anxiety and support for exclusionary social policies in adulthood.

Yet the Turkish students’ cognitive maps were not monolithically negative. The analysis also surfaced themes of Positive Perspective and Attributes, together with Sadness and Compassion, revealing a genuine undercurrent of empathy and solidarity among host-community children. This duality is analytically important: it suggests that the concept of refugee in these students’ minds is contested ground, where exclusionary framings coexist with humanitarian ones. For educators and policymakers, the coexistence of both clusters within the same cognitive structures represents an opportunity, because interventions can amplify the empathetic associations rather than needing to construct prosocial attitudes from nothing.

The profiles of the Syrian and Iraqi students were qualitatively different in ways that reflect lived experience. Their associations centered on themes bound up with forced displacement itself: Poverty and the Struggle for Survival, Violence and Death, and Physical and Emotional Pain. For these children, the term refugee is not an external social category but a compressed autobiography, a linguistic container for memories of conflict, loss, deprivation, and the physical and psychological costs of flight. The research also found that Syrian and Iraqi students associated the concept with a search for hope, indicating that even within profoundly painful semantic fields, displaced children maintain a forward-looking, aspirational dimension to their self-understanding.

Correspondence analysis, a statistical technique that visualizes the relationships between categorical variables in a shared space, confirmed that the thematic divergence between the Turkish group on one side and the Syrian and Iraqi groups on the other was statistically significant. This formal confirmation matters because it rules out the possibility that the observed differences were merely anecdotal or the product of random variation in word choice. Instead, the data indicate two meaningfully distinct cognitive geographies of the same concept: one organized around the vantage point of the receiving society, oscillating between threat and compassion, and the other organized around the vantage point of displacement, oscillating between trauma and hope.

The psychological implications of this divergence extend well beyond the classroom. Cognitive structures of the kind captured by the Word Association Test function as interpretive lenses through which subsequent social information is filtered. When host-community children’s mental maps foreground threat and blame, everyday interactions with displaced peers risk being encoded through suspicion, reinforcing stereotype and fueling a self-perpetuating cycle of othering. Conversely, when displaced children’s associations are dominated by pain and loss, their sense of belonging in the school environment may remain fragile, particularly if the peer environment validates exclusionary narratives. The study suggests that these two cognitive worlds currently operate side by side in Turkish schools, with limited semantic overlap between how the host and displaced groups understand who a refugee is.

The authors argue that the findings make a direct case for targeted educational interventions designed to reduce stereotypical and exclusionary associations and to strengthen empathy, perspective-taking, and shared human values. Because the Word Association Test exposes the raw material of children’s conceptual thinking, the same technique can serve as a diagnostic instrument before and after such interventions, allowing educators to measure whether exclusionary word clusters shrink and empathetic ones expand. The researchers specifically recommend that schools and educators use these insights to challenge exclusionary narratives, promote inclusive peer relations, and create supportive environments that foster the inclusion and well-being of children from forced-migration backgrounds. In practice, this could involve structured contact programs, collaborative learning, and curricular approaches that reframe the refugee concept around common humanity rather than difference.

As displacement continues to reshape societies across the Middle East, Europe, and beyond, this study offers a rare quantitative glimpse into the earliest cognitive layer where integration succeeds or fails: the associative networks children build around a single word. The contrast between Turkish students’ security-laden but partially empathetic maps and Syrian and Iraqi students’ trauma-tinged but hopeful ones encapsulates the central challenge of diverse classrooms. The same term that evokes borders and burden for one child evokes graves and survival for another, and only deliberate educational design can bridge that gap. Published as open-access research with ethics approval from Ondokuz Mayıs University and conducted under the Declaration of Helsinki with parental consent and children’s right to withdraw, the study provides both the evidence and the methodological toolkit for educators willing to begin that work, transforming the mental map of refugee from a marker of division into a shared terrain of understanding.

Subject of Research: Cognitive structures and perceptions of the concept of refugee among Turkish, Syrian, and Iraqi secondary school students

Article Title: The mental map of the concept of “refugee”: a comparative analysis of the cognitive structures of Turkish, Syrian, and Iraqi students

Article References: Ünal, O., Karadağ, Y., & Yilar, M. B. (2026). The mental map of the concept of “refugee”: a comparative analysis of the cognitive structures of Turkish, Syrian, and Iraqi students. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05688-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05688-8

Keywords: refugee perception, word association test, cognitive structure, Turkish students, Syrian students, Iraqi students, social integration, inclusive education, forced displacement, child psychology, intergroup relations, Türkiye