Research on father engagement is heavily focused on Western families. Western-based programs to support fathers often do so in an individualistic manner, failing to address cultures in places where collective care is common. Limited existing research on fathers’ involvement in play emphasizes the influence of income and working status on fathers’ views on play. Overall, there is very little research on fathers' perceptions of play in refugee contexts, and there is no extensive study exploring this topic in the Rohingya context. In this context of forced displacement, we ask the following research question about the Rohingya fathers' perceptions of play.

Research Question:

How do fathers perceive children’s play in both structured (Humanitarian Play Labs) as well as unstructured (home and surrounding areas) play settings in the Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh?

Millions of refugees around the world suffer in silence, not because they lack a voice, but because their pain is misunderstood or mismeasured.

On World Refugee Day, we uplift the voices and lived realities of displaced communities and call for deeper, more culturally responsive care.

At TIES, we work hard to partner with local communities and integrate methods that capture participant voices directly. For example, the paper we reshare today highlights some of the qualitative work we have done as part of the iRRRd study, led by Rohingya researchers and collaborators, to explore cultural concepts of distress (CCDs) among Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar. It identifies five locally meaningful expressions of emotional suffering, like tenshon and bishi sinta, that often go unrecognized by standard mental health tools.

As we act in solidarity with refugees, we must design support systems that reflect how communities themselves understand and communicate distress.