Health-Related Quality of Life Among Unaccompanied Refugee Minors Settled in a Norwegian Municipality.

The study aimed to examine health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in a group of unaccompanied refugee minors (URMs) and to investigate associations between HRQoL and potential risk and protective factors. The sample includes 79 URMs aged 15 to 20 (83.3% male; 80% response rate) who responded to the KIDSCREEN-27 as a measure of HRQoL. URMs reported lower scores on the HRQoL Index (d = 0.5), (d = 0.8), (d = 0.7), (d = 0.5), and (d = 0.5), but not (d = 0.04) compared to European population norms. Participants with fewer symptoms of depression had better HRQoL across all dimensions, and URMs with fewer post-traumatic symptoms and less frequent contact with contact persons reported better . All effect sizes ranged from small to medium. Contact with family in the home country was not significantly associated with HRQoL. Potential traumatic events were negatively associated with and in post-hoc analyses. To conclude, URMs presented lower HRQoL than European population norms, and HRQoL was related to their reported mental health symptoms.