The question that the Illinois University School of Nursing was trying to answer was how effective their interventions were in reducing depression symptoms among Southeast Asian (S. E. A) refugee children.
What they decided to do was to create an eight- week school based intervention where bilingual and bmulticultural teachers, school nurses and nurse researchers would be there to help lower the depressiveon symptoms of the Southeast Asian children.
The program was there to address the children’s adaptation issues, culture and their development of coping skills. The SWOT needs assessment was conducted in the program.

The strengths of the program was the incorporation of the school resources such as bilingual teachers, staff, school nurses and nurse researchers. In addition, investigators also used the existing data such as surveys and statistics from previous studies and researchers to develop appropriate method for the program.

The weaknesses of the program were the limited resources and the minimaless effort in developing and evaluating the school-based program for Southeast Asian refugee children.

The opportunity factor was that the program could obtain funding from the community, public health agencies, and government.
However, the threat that could lead to the risk of failure of the program was the challenge of limited resources allocation to develop the program in athe long run. Southeast Asian refugee children have a high rate of depression and are less likely to receive mental health services due to a lack of recsoursces.
It is important to have a school-based mental health program to lower the depression among this minority group. Through school environments, the majority of children in need can have access to needed  support services that provide for an environment of prevention, identification, and intervention in order to prevent more serious issues in life.

The target population was Southeast Asian refugee children.
They conducted a convenience sample that consisted of 58 S.E.A. refugee children who attended an urban public school in the Midwest. Of the 58 children, 24 were Vietnamese and 34 were Cambodian. The children’s age ranged from 6 to 15 years old. 25 were male and 33 were female. On the other hand, there were 56% of the children reported living with both their parents, 24% of the children reported living with their mother, and 6.9% of the children reported living with other relatives. In addition, approximately 67% of children were practicing a religion, including Buddhism, Catholicism, and Protestantism.

All of the S.E.A. refugee children felt comfortable speaking and writing the English language except 2 children. Most of these children also participated in a previous study dconmpleted by Fox and Cowell in 1996 where their experience with pre and post-migration violence experiences were documented.

Both quantitative and qualitative study designs were used. There were no control or comparison groups in the study. The Qquantitative data was collected by socio-demographic and depression screenings with the Children’s Depression Inventory (CDI). The S.E.A. children were screened for depression about one month before the intervention. The children were also screened at the 4th and 8th week of the intervention and one month after the intervention. The Qqualitative data was collected by asking the children to draw pictures expressing feelings and filling out a personal strength checklist in order to determine whether the child was happy with themselfves or not.
The program was held for 1 hour after school, for 8 consecutive weeks.
The teachers and nurses who designed, implemented, and participated in the intervention either spoke Cambodian or Vietnamese and English. They divided the children into separate age groups and held sessions that created cognitive-behavioral interactions. The sessions introduced objectives and strategies that emphasized skill building. The intervention was aimed to cope with depression rather than the specific treatments of depression for S.E.A. children. The program also included “homework assignments” that required parent and child interaction.