“Keeping Culture in Mind”: Relational Thinking and the Bedouin Community

"God Did Not Create Us This Way": An Investigation into the Experiences of School Counselors Working with Arab-Muslim LGBTQ Youth

Schools play a key role in supporting, protecting, and advocating for LGBTQ students. However, educational programs worldwide tend to exclude and marginalize LGBTQ issues, especially when it comes to ethnic and racial minorities. In the current study, we examined Arab school counselors' experiences of working with Arab-Muslim LGBTQ youth. After 100 counselors declined to participate, the study included semi-structured interviews with 60 female counselors in Arab-Muslim schools in Israel. Data were analyzed using interpretive phenomenological analysis. Four main themes emerged: religious considerations, causal explanations of LGBTQ orientation, working practices, and supportive resources. Our findings point to the unique challenges facing Arab school counselors who are torn between their professional values and traditional norms. Among the strategies counselors used for managing this tension were separating LGBTQ orientation from LGBTQ adolescents, passive listening while avoiding proactive inquiry, and referring to LBGTQ orientation as a transient phase. Our findings emphasize the need to develop culturally relevant programs that address LGBTQ orientation for students, teachers, and families.

A Game-Theory-Based Approach to Promoting Health Policy among Minorities

The importance of designing policy measures that government and other public bodies apply to different populations has been escalating in recent decades. This study seeks the best way to induce conservative minority groups to cooperate with healthcare policy. The case study focuses on the Bedouin population of Israel and its willingness to accept COVID-19 vaccination. The study is based on vaccination data from the Israel Ministry of Health for the country's entire Bedouin population, twenty-four semi-structured in-depth interviews with relevant key stakeholders, and the use of game-theory tools to profile the players, the utility functions, and various equilibrium combinations. By comparing the groups and integrating game-theory tools into the process, we reveal variables that may affect healthcare processes among conservative minority communities. Finally, cross-tabulating the results with the interview findings strengthens the insights and allows a culturally adjusted policy to be adopted. The different starting points of different minority populations have implications for the design of requisite policies in both the short and the long terms. The analysis of the game allowed us to indicate the strategy that policymakers should adopt in consideration of variables that should be taken into account in order to improve cooperation and the ability to apply policy. To increase vaccination rates among conservative minority communities in general and the Bedouin population in particular, trust in the government must be increased in the long term. In the short term, trust in the medical profession must be increased, and also health literacy.

An Authentic Inner Compass and Need Satisfaction as Wellbeing Resources in Bedouin Teaching Students During the COVID-19

A growing body of literature suggests that students from underserved backgrounds are more vulnerable to the adverse economic, emotional, and academic effects of the current COVID-19 pandemic. While this vulnerability was attributed to multiple structural and socio-cultural barriers, little attention has been paid to the role of psychological resources in preserving wellbeing in times of crisis and change. Guided by the Self-Determination Theory (SDT), the current study examined the role of the authentic inner compass (AIC) and need-satisfaction in predicting the wellbeing of Bedouin students attending teachers' higher education institutes in the south of Israel during the COVID-19. Participants were 84 Bedouin teaching students (84.1% female) who completed online questionnaires addressing the sense of AIC, need-based experiences, psychological distress, and positive affect. Consistent with the propositions of the SDT, we found that a strong and clear sense of AIC, as well as high need satisfaction and low need frustration, were associated with lower distress and higher positive effect in Bedouin teaching students. We have also found that need satisfaction moderated the effect of the AIC on students' wellbeing so that AIC better predicted lower distress and higher positive effect when students' levels of need satisfaction were higher. Our findings lend further support to the importance of the AIC and need satisfaction to optimal functioning even in collectivist cultural contexts that do not prioritize values of autonomy. The current study provides insight into the interplay between AIC and need-based experience by describing the conditions under which AIC may be beneficial for wellbeing in times of crisis.