The study’s methodology was deliberately community-anchored. Rather than recruiting through clinics, where participants might fear exposure, the team reached eligible women through immigration aid organizations and community networks, including the Bhutanese Community of Central Ohio and the Riverview International Center. Of 45 eligible participants, 40 were included in the final analytic sample. Interviews followed a validated semi-structured questionnaire, were transcribed, and then imported into ATLAS.ti software for coding. The researchers used an iterative coding process with multiple rounds of review to verify transcription and coding accuracy, a quality-control step that matters greatly in qualitative research, where the credibility of themes depends on the rigor of the analytic trail. The study was approved by Denison University’s Institutional Review Board on May 21, 2025, and all participants gave informed consent.

Three overarching themes emerged from the analysis. The first concerned systemic and structural barriers to accessing healthcare under the current administration. The second captured patients’ knowledge gaps and navigation challenges within the American health system. The third addressed perceived quality and cultural responsiveness of care. This tripartite structure is analytically useful because it separates problems that require different remedies: policy-level reform, patient education and navigation support, and provider-level cultural competence. Yet the themes also interact. A woman who cannot afford care and simultaneously fears deportation faces a compounded barrier that neither a leaflet nor a bilingual interpreter alone can resolve.

The numbers reported in the study are striking. Two-thirds of participants, 67.5 percent, cited a lack of affordable care as a barrier, and 62.5 percent reported out-of-pocket expenses even when they held insurance. Perhaps most alarmingly in the current political climate, 27.5 percent said they had avoided seeking care because of fear of deportation. That figure quantifies a phenomenon public health researchers have long worried about: when immigration enforcement intensifies, the chilling effect extends beyond undocumented individuals to entire communities, including legally resettled refugees who are, in principle, protected. The perception of risk, whether or not it matches legal reality, is enough to suppress care-seeking, with consequences that accumulate silently in the form of delayed diagnoses, untreated chronic conditions, and foregone preventive services.

Informational barriers proved nearly as consequential as financial ones. Half of the participants, 50 percent, reported limited understanding of how the U.S. healthcare system works, including confusion about the differences between types of care, such as the distinction between primary care, urgent care, and emergency services. Many also struggled to understand how insurance operates, a system that even native-born Americans find opaque. Language difficulties were cited by 45 percent of participants, and transportation issues by 30 percent. These are not minor frictions; they are gatekeeping mechanisms. A refugee woman who cannot describe her symptoms in English, cannot decipher an insurance explanation of benefits, and cannot reach a clinic without a car faces a series of sequential filters, each of which can independently terminate a care-seeking attempt.

The third theme, care quality and cultural responsiveness, revealed a more mixed picture. A majority of participants, 67.5 percent, said they felt respected in healthcare encounters, which the researchers note as a genuinely positive signal. But 65 percent reported long wait times for appointments, and 30 percent described experiences of discrimination. The coexistence of these findings is important: respect and discrimination are not mutually exclusive across a population, and a system can be welcoming on average while failing specific individuals. For refugee women, who may carry trauma from displacement and who often come from medical cultures with different norms around consent, modesty, and gender, perceived disrespect or bias can deter future engagement with care even when a single visit is clinically adequate.

The structural vulnerability framework that anchors the study deserves attention because it reframes the analytical question. Traditional health services research often asks why individuals fail to use available services, implicitly locating the problem in patient behavior. A structural vulnerability approach instead asks how political, economic, and institutional arrangements produce vulnerability in the first place. Under this lens, fear of deportation is not a psychological quirk to be counseled away but a rational response to a policy environment; unaffordable care is not a budgeting failure but the predictable output of a financing system that leaves gaps even for the insured; and navigation confusion is the foreseeable result of a system designed around assumptions of literacy, English fluency, and familiarity with insurance mechanics.

The timing of the research is significant. The interviews were conducted in mid-2025, under an administration that had intensified immigration enforcement, and the authors explicitly frame the study as an examination of healthcare access under current policy conditions. The abstract notes that recent changes in immigration enforcement and public policy raised concerns about effects on healthcare-seeking behaviors among refugee communities, and the findings appear to confirm those concerns. The researchers also connect their results to policy, arguing that addressing the barriers requires a coordinated, multi-sectoral response encompassing systemic policy changes, community-rooted support systems, culturally competent care, and a more inclusive public health narrative. That last phrase is notable: it suggests that how public health institutions talk about refugees, and whether refugees see themselves as legitimate participants in the health system, is itself part of the access problem.

For readers outside migration health, the study offers a compact lesson in how policy ripples through clinical encounters. A change in enforcement posture in Washington does not need to touch a single clinic in Columbus to alter what happens inside it. It reaches patients through rumor, community networks, and news coverage, and it manifests as missed appointments, untreated infections, and pregnancies entering prenatal care late or not at all. Because the study focused on women of reproductive age, the implications extend to maternal and child health, where delayed care carries measurable risks for both mothers and infants. The authors’ recruitment through community organizations also demonstrates a practical model: trusted intermediaries can reach populations that formal health systems cannot, and partnerships with groups like the Bhutanese Community of Central Ohio are not merely recruitment conveniences but infrastructure for health outreach.

The study’s limitations are those inherent to qualitative design: 40 participants in one state cannot be generalized to all refugee women in the United States, and self-reported experiences are shaped by recall and by what participants feel safe disclosing. Yet the specificity of the findings, and their convergence with a broader literature on immigrant health under restrictive policy climates, give them weight. What the research documents most clearly is that healthcare access for refugee women is not a single problem with a single fix. It is a lattice of financial, informational, linguistic, logistical, and political constraints, each reinforcing the others. Dismantling it, the authors argue, will require action on all strands at once, from insurance design and interpretation services to the political signals that determine whether a woman believes a clinic is a safe place to walk into.

Subject of Research: Barriers to healthcare access and utilization among refugee women in Ohio

Article Title: Healthcare access and utilization among refugee women in Ohio: a qualitative study using a structural vulnerability framework

Article References: Ibrahimi, S., Lord, A., Laber, G., Alemayehu, B., & Zokhidova, G. (2026). Healthcare access and utilization among refugee women in Ohio: a qualitative study using a structural vulnerability framework. International Journal for Equity in Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-026-03073-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12939-026-03073-w

Keywords: refugee health, healthcare access, Ohio, structural vulnerability, immigration policy, qualitative research, women's health, health equity, deportation fear, cultural competence, maternal health, public health

The study rested on eleven individual, face-to-face, in-depth interviews with North Korean defector women who had been diagnosed with cervical cancer. Rather than measuring outcomes with numbers, the researchers used thematic analysis, a rigorous qualitative method refined by Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, in which interview transcripts are coded line by line and the codes are clustered into patterns that capture the shared structure of an experience. The team followed established criteria for trustworthiness in naturalistic inquiry, and the protocol was approved by the Chonnam National University Ethics Review Committee, with written informed consent obtained from every participant before data collection began.

From the transcripts, six major themes emerged, and together they trace an arc from suffering toward cautious renewal. The women described cancer as a consequence of prolonged sacrifice and neglect, a framing that reflects lives spent enduring hardship in North Korea and during perilous escapes, followed by years in which their own health was the last priority. Screening for cervical cancer was far from routine in their prior lives; studies of knowledge, attitudes, and practice in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have documented limited awareness of the disease and of Pap testing, particularly in rural provinces, and defector women arriving in the South often carry that gap with them. By the time symptoms or diagnoses appeared, many participants interpreted the cancer not as random misfortune but as the bodily price of decades of deprivation.

The second theme, powerlessness during immediate treatment, captures the disorientation of confronting a highly technical, fast-moving South Korean healthcare system without the cultural and linguistic tools to navigate it. Previous research has shown that even the vocabulary of medicine diverges sharply between the two Koreas: a 2018 analysis in the Korean Journal of Medical Education found substantial discrepancies in general surgery terminology between North and South, meaning that a defector patient may literally not share words for organs, procedures, or diagnoses with her own physicians. Mixed-methods studies of healthcare utilization among North Korean refugees in South Korea have similarly documented low rates of preventive service use, tied to limited health literacy and the sheer unfamiliarity of insurance, referral, and appointment systems. For women already frightened by a cancer diagnosis, this bureaucratic and linguistic fog deepened a sense of losing control at the moment they most needed agency.

The third and fourth themes move inward, to the body and to intimacy. Participants described profound transformations in self and body image as surgery, radiation, or other treatments altered how they saw and inhabited themselves. Gynecological cancer strikes at the anatomical core of identity for many women, and international qualitative work, including studies of South African women after gynecological cancer treatment and research linking hysterectomy to body image and sexual satisfaction, has shown that these changes ripple far beyond the hospital. The defector women in this study also reported a sense of loss of intimacy and sexual desire, a dimension of survivorship that clinicians rarely ask about and patients rarely volunteer. For women whose histories may include sexual violence, an exposure documented among North Korean refugee women and linked in prior research to acculturative stress and hazardous drinking, the sexual dimension of cancer care can reopen old wounds while adding new ones.

Against this backdrop of loss, the study’s final two themes carry a striking note of hope. Many participants described South Korea as a second homeland offering new life, a place where, despite the alienation of the healthcare system, they encountered treatments, social support, and freedoms unavailable in the North. And in the theme the researchers called moving toward a healthier life, the women articulated a resolve to change: to quit harmful habits, attend follow-up care, protect their remaining health, and, in some cases, imagine futures they had never permitted themselves to consider. This pattern echoes the literature on post-traumatic growth among refugee populations, which documents that survivors of extreme adversity can emerge from crisis with revised priorities, deeper relationships, and renewed purpose, even while carrying lasting scars.

The significance of these findings lies partly in what they reveal about structural inequity. Cervical cancer is driven by persistent infection with high-risk human papillomavirus, and the World Health Organization has launched a global strategy to eliminate it as a public health problem through vaccination, screening, and treatment. Yet meta-analyses published in 2025 confirm that disparities in HPV vaccination and in cervical cancer prevention and screening persist across and within countries, concentrating risk among marginalized women. North Korean defectors sit at the intersection of several such vulnerabilities: refugee status, trauma exposure, low health literacy, poverty, and cultural stigma around reproductive health. Retrospective studies among defectors have documented worse general health and healthcare access compared with South Korean peers, and qualitative work exploring factors associated with Pap test use among North Korean refugees has identified barriers ranging from embarrassment to fatalism about cancer.

The authors argue that addressing these challenges requires more than translating pamphlets. Communication barriers must be actively dismantled, they contend, and support must be culturally sensitive, meaning that care teams should understand the sociopolitical history patients carry, the stigma attached to cervical cancer and to sexual health in their communities of origin, and the distrust that can accumulate after years of precarious survival. The study points toward tailored interventions that recognize the impact of cancer on self-perception and intimacy, including counseling that explicitly addresses body image and sexual health, patient navigation to help defector women move through screening, diagnosis, and treatment, and survivorship programs designed with, rather than merely for, this population. Prior work on mobile video interventions for defector women’s health suggests that technology-mediated education can be one accessible channel, but the new findings suggest that human, relationship-based support remains irreplaceable.

The research also carries a methodological message. In an era dominated by large datasets and randomized trials, the authors and the broader literature they cite make the case that qualitative methods are indispensable for understanding the lived texture of health inequity. Numbers can show that defector women underuse preventive services; only listening to them reveals why, and what would need to change. The interview data themselves are not publicly available, protected by confidentiality agreements with participants and ethical restrictions, a reminder of how fragile and precious such testimony is. The work was funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea and by Chonnam National University, and the researchers emphasize that their findings can inform future studies, guide culturally sensitive policy, and shape supportive care programs for defector patients.

For a global audience, the study is a reminder that the endgame of cancer care is not survival alone but the restoration of personhood. A woman who crosses a border, rebuilds a life in an unfamiliar society, and then faces a cancer diagnosis is asked to fight on every front at once: biologically, linguistically, financially, and emotionally. What the eleven women of this study make clear is that medicine can defeat the tumor and still leave the patient stranded unless the system learns to see her whole. As cervical cancer elimination efforts accelerate worldwide, the experiences of North Korean defector women in South Korea stand as a pointed test of whether that campaign will truly reach the women who need it most, and a demonstration that the path to equitable cancer care begins with listening.

Subject of Research: Illness experiences and supportive care needs of North Korean defector women with cervical cancer

Article Title: Experiences and challenges of North Korean defectors with cervical cancer: a qualitative study using thematic analysis

Article References: Ahn, S. Y., & Yu, S.-Y. (2026). Experiences and challenges of North Korean defectors with cervical cancer: a qualitative study using thematic analysis. Supportive Care in Cancer, 34(10), Article 926. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00520-026-11143-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00520-026-11143-6

Keywords: cervical cancer, North Korean defectors, qualitative research, thematic analysis, health inequities, refugee health, HPV, cancer screening, body image, sexual health, supportive care, South Korea

The research team scoured the Scopus database, one of the largest curated indexes of peer-reviewed literature, for publications on refugee and forced displacement issues in Southeast Asia published between 1975 and 2025. Using a structured search strategy paired with an explicit screening protocol against pre-defined inclusion and exclusion criteria, the authors filtered out records that were only peripherally related to the topic. The final corpus comprised 1,110 publications, a dataset spanning half a century of scholarship on asylum seekers, internally displaced persons, and stateless populations. The analysis was conducted using a combination of bibliometric software: BiblioMagika for data processing, OpenRefine for cleaning and standardising records, and VOSviewer for constructing and visualising co-occurrence networks of author keywords.

Bibliometric analysis is a quantitative science-mapping technique that treats publications, citations, and keywords as data points rather than reading their content in depth. Performance indicators, such as annual publication counts, citation totals, and the productivity of individual authors and countries, describe the volume and impact of a field. Co-occurrence mapping, by contrast, reveals its conceptual anatomy: when two keywords appear together in the same article more often than chance would predict, they are drawn closer together in a network diagram, and dense clusters of connected terms expose the thematic pillars around which a discipline organises itself. This dual approach allowed the researchers to chart both the growth trajectory of Southeast Asian refugee scholarship and the intellectual architecture underpinning it.

The headline finding concerns timing. Publication output remained modest for decades but rose markedly from the 2010s onward, a surge that coincides with the intensifying international visibility of the Rohingya crisis after 2012, when sectarian violence in Rakhine State triggered renewed displacement and drew sustained global media attention. The authors are careful about what this correlation means. Because their data are descriptive, they interpret the association as suggestive rather than causal; the analysis cannot demonstrate that the Rohingya emergency itself drove the increase in publications, only that the two trends unfolded in parallel. Even so, the pattern is striking: a humanitarian catastrophe that unfolded largely within the region appears to have been accompanied by an expansion of the academic literature documenting and analysing displacement.

Equally revealing is what the performance indicators show about who produces this knowledge. Research output is concentrated among a limited group of author affiliations and contributing countries, indicating uneven participation in the indexed literature. This concentration matters for reasons that go beyond bibliometric curiosity. Scholarship on displacement is often produced by institutions far from the displacement itself, and the new study’s evidence of a narrow base of productive affiliations raises familiar questions about whose perspectives shape the research agenda, who has access to publication channels, and how the priorities of international journals interact with the concerns of local communities, host governments, and displaced people themselves.

The thematic mapping is where the study delivers its richest technical contribution. Aggregate author-keyword co-occurrence analysis identified nine coexisting thematic areas. The first cluster concerns refugee health and trauma, a lineage that stretches back to some of the earliest and most highly cited works in the corpus, including studies of trauma and survival among Burmese political dissidents in Thailand published in the mid-1990s and research on the functional health of Cambodians living in border camps. A second cluster addresses Rohingya statelessness and rights, while a third examines legal precarity and access to health services, reflecting the peculiar limbo in which most refugees in Southeast Asia live, since many states in the region are not parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol.

The remaining clusters extend the map across the full breadth of the displacement experience. One area covers asylum governance in the maritime corridor, evoking the irregular boat movements through the Andaman Sea and the policy responses they provoke. Another addresses camp-based displacement and identity, drawing on decades of research along the Thailand-Myanmar border. A sixth cluster concerns internal displacement, conflict, and disasters, encompassing both war-driven displacement and the upheaval caused by events such as the Aceh tsunami. Two further areas focus on women, children, and reproductive health, including studies of menstrual hygiene management challenges facing displaced girls and women, and on the international protection architecture itself, including legal scholarship on how politics shaped the outcome of the 1967 Protocol. The ninth cluster examines protracted displacement and education, including barriers to higher education faced by Burmese refugees in Thailand.

Together, these clusters suggest clear priorities for future research. The authors argue that the patterns point toward comparative studies that span multiple countries and displacement contexts, longitudinal designs that track displaced populations and policy changes over time, and greater methodological diversity across the field. They are equally candid about the limits of their own analysis: the keyword co-occurrence data do not establish how themes changed over time, and studies that fall below the keyword occurrence threshold are invisible to the network. The reliance on a single database, Scopus, also means that grey literature, non-English publications, and work in regional journals not indexed by Scopus remain outside the picture, a constraint the authors acknowledge given licensing restrictions that prevent public sharing of the raw bibliographic records.

The timing of this mapping exercise could hardly be more consequential. UNHCR’s Global Trends reporting continues to document record levels of forced displacement worldwide, and Southeast Asia remains both a source and a destination region for people fleeing persecution, conflict, and disaster. Recent legal scholarship, cited in the study, analyses Thailand’s national screening mechanism as a case of partial acculturation to international refugee law, illustrating how host states in the region are incrementally, and unevenly, building domestic structures for managing asylum. A consolidated evidence base of the kind this study provides gives policymakers, humanitarian agencies, and researchers a shared map of what is known, and just as importantly, of where the gaps lie.

What makes the study notable within bibliometrics itself is its methodological transparency. The authors describe a structured search strategy, an explicit screening protocol, and a documented pipeline through BiblioMagika, OpenRefine, and VOSviewer, with derived datasets available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. No custom code was developed, and the study involved no human participants, requiring no ethical approval. By systematically mapping the knowledge structure of refugee and forced displacement scholarship in Southeast Asia, the team has converted five decades of scattered publications into an organised intellectual geography, one that future studies of regional migration governance and protection regimes can navigate, interrogate, and extend as the forces that displace people across the region continue to evolve.

Subject of Research: Bibliometric mapping of refugee and forced displacement research in Southeast Asia from 1975 to 2025

Article Title: Refugee and forced displacement research in Southeast Asia (1975–2025): a bibliometric analysis of trends and future directions

Article References: Muis, A. M. R. A., Hajimin, M. N. H. H., & Paulus, A. A. (2026). Refugee and forced displacement research in Southeast Asia (1975–2025): a bibliometric analysis of trends and future directions. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 542. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01855-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01855-1

Keywords: refugee studies, forced displacement, Southeast Asia, bibliometric analysis, Rohingya, statelessness, internal displacement, asylum governance, refugee health, VOSviewer, Scopus, migration governance

The study employed a convergent mixed-methods design carried out between January and April 2026 in Peshawar, Quetta, and Islamabad, cities that host substantial Afghan refugee populations. Quantitative data came from 150 Afghan refugee children aged 10 to 17 years, who completed structured questionnaires. This numerical backbone was complemented by qualitative depth: 35 semi-structured interviews were conducted with refugee children, their caregivers, and community representatives. Quantitative analyses were performed in IBM SPSS Statistics and R, encompassing descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, Pearson correlations, bivariate comparisons, and multiple linear regression, while the interview material was analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. The design allowed the researcher to test statistical relationships and then check whether the lived experiences described in interviews told the same story.

The descriptive results paint a picture of moderate but fragile well-being resting on weak structural foundations. Mean scores indicated moderate physical health (M = 3.48, SD = 0.71), moderate psychological well-being (M = 3.21, SD = 0.76), and a moderate sense of belonging (M = 3.05, SD = 0.81). Beneath those middling averages, however, sat the structural deficits: healthcare accessibility scored lowest among the moderate measures (M = 2.94, SD = 0.82), housing quality fell further (M = 2.81, SD = 0.79), and food security was the weakest domain of all (M = 2.73, SD = 0.88). In other words, the children surveyed were neither in crisis nor thriving; they were surviving in conditions where the basic infrastructure of a healthy childhood, from reliable food to adequate shelter to reachable medical care, was consistently the weakest link.

The correlational analysis revealed how tightly these threads are woven together. Sense of belonging was strongly positively correlated with social support (r = .73), psychological well-being (r = .71), and physical health (r = .65), and strongly negatively correlated with perceived discrimination (r = −.69), with all of these associations reaching statistical significance at p < .001. These effect sizes are unusually large for social science research, indicating that the children who felt connected to others were also, in large measure, the children who felt healthier and happier, while those who perceived discrimination were markedly less likely to feel they belonged anywhere at all.

Multiple linear regression pushed the analysis further, testing which factors independently predicted children’s sense of belonging when all others were held constant. The overall model was highly significant, F(12,137) = 24.51, p < .001, and explained 68.2 percent of the variance in belonging (R² = 0.682; adjusted R² = 0.654), a remarkably high proportion for research on human social outcomes. Within that model, social support emerged as the strongest positive correlate (β = 0.301), followed by psychological well-being (β = 0.245), healthcare accessibility (β = 0.238), and educational access (β = 0.201). Perceived discrimination stood out as the most powerful negative correlate (β = −0.347), outweighing even the strongest positive factor. All reported coefficients were statistically significant at p ≤ .002.

The pattern of these coefficients carries a technical implication worth pausing on. Discrimination’s beta weight exceeding every positive predictor means that the corrosive effect of being treated as an outsider is not merely one disadvantage among many; it is, in this dataset, the dominant force suppressing children’s sense of belonging. Meanwhile, the independent contributions of healthcare accessibility and educational access demonstrate that belonging is not purely an emotional or interpersonal phenomenon. Children who could reach a clinic and attend school felt that they belonged more fully, suggesting that material inclusion, the practical ability to use the institutions of the society one lives in, is itself a psychological resource.

The qualitative interviews converged on the same conclusions from a different direction. Thematic analysis of the 35 interviews with children, caregivers, and community representatives highlighted structural barriers, social exclusion, and the importance of supportive relationships for children’s belonging. Where the regression quantified discrimination’s statistical weight, the interviews gave that weight texture: the experience of exclusion, the difficulty of navigating services designed for others, and the protective role of families and communities who stood between children and a hostile environment. The convergence of the two strands of evidence strengthens the study’s central claim, because the numbers and the narratives point in the same direction independently.

The study’s conclusion reframes the problem in a way that challenges common intuitions about refugee health. Afghan refugee children’s health and belonging, the author argues, are socially produced through intersecting structural inequalities rather than arising from individual vulnerability alone. This distinction matters for policy. If poor health among refugee children were primarily a matter of individual vulnerability, interventions would focus narrowly on treating sick children one by one. But if health is manufactured by legal insecurity, discriminatory treatment, inaccessible clinics, inadequate housing, and unreliable food supplies, then the effective levers are structural: the rules, institutions, and social attitudes that determine what kind of childhood a displaced child is permitted to have.

The author’s stated conclusions point toward rights-based policies as the necessary response: strengthening legal protection, ensuring equitable healthcare, building inclusive education systems, and fostering community support while actively reducing discrimination. Each of these policy domains maps directly onto a significant predictor in the regression model. Legal protection addresses the legal insecurity that underlies displacement-related disadvantage; equitable healthcare and inclusive education correspond to the healthcare accessibility and educational access coefficients; and community support corresponds to the social support variable, which carried the largest positive beta weight in the model. Reducing discrimination, meanwhile, addresses the single strongest negative correlate of belonging identified in the analysis.

For the millions of children living in protracted displacement worldwide, this study offers both a warning and a measure of hope. The warning is that discrimination is not a soft issue to be addressed after material needs are met; in this data it was the heaviest single burden pressing down on children’s sense of belonging. The hope is that the same analysis shows belonging to be highly responsive to changeable conditions: where social support, healthcare, and education reach refugee children, their well-being and their sense of connection rise together. The research was reviewed and approved by the Advanced Board of Studies and Research at The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, with informed consent obtained from parents or guardians alongside children’s assent, and it is published open access, making the full evidence base available to the policymakers, clinicians, and communities whose decisions will determine whether these children are treated as guests to be tolerated or as children to be included.

Subject of Research: Health, belonging, and structural inequality among Afghan refugee children in Pakistan

Article Title: Health, belonging, and structural inequality: Afghan refugee children’s experiences in Pakistan

Article References: Latif, M. A. (2026). Health, belonging, and structural inequality: Afghan refugee children’s experiences in Pakistan. BMC Pediatrics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12887-026-07754-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12887-026-07754-x

Keywords: Afghan refugee children, health inequalities, structural inequality, sense of belonging, social determinants of health, Pakistan, mixed methods, perceived discrimination, healthcare accessibility, inclusive education, refugee health, child well-being