Report on a survey of mobility disability amongst Syrian refugees living in Turkey. (English)

More than 5.6 million people have fled Syria since the start of theCivil War in 2011, seeking refuge in neighbouring countries such as Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. Turkey has approximately one percent of the world population but hosts nearly 15 percent of the global refugee population, including 3.6 million Syrian refugees, the largest number of registered foreigners under temporary protection. In this study we report on the findings of 2 surveys distributed online in 2020 to Syrian refugees living under temporary protection in Turkey, in order to understand the prevalence of mobility disability amongst Syrian refugee populations there. The first used the ‘VQF-25 Questionnaire’, and the second the ‘Mobility and Life-space Questionnaire’. A total of 495 and 567 questionnaires respectively were completed and returned to the study team, with a gender ratio amongst respondents of 1 female to 3 males in both cases, 70% of whom urban dwellers. Our findings point to the vulnerability of Syrian refugees in Turkey, with the mobility score of 68% of respondents at between 6% and 58%, as compared to those of post-stroke victims of between 62.2% to 63.15% (Yang et al., 2017) or between 41.7% to 64.5% (Crowe et al., 2008). To date we are not aware of any research that has looked specifically at the question of mobility disability among Syrian Refugees in the context of Turkey, so that we hope this study will provide some useful insights to organisations supporting Syrian refugees or persons with disability in Turkey.