Modelling social inclusion, self-esteem, loneliness, psychological distress, and psychological resilience of refugees: Does hospitableness matter?

Abstract

Despite a growing stream of research addressing hospitableness in destinations and hospitality settings, very little is known about the role of hospitableness in fostering favorable social outcomes for vulnerable individuals such as refugees. This omission is intriguing given the heated debate on how local communities in refugee hosting countries can contribute to tackling the refugee crisis. Drawing on data collected from Ukrainian refugees hosted by locals in Slovakia, this study proposes and tests a conceptual model linking hospitableness, social inclusion, self-esteem, loneliness, psychological distress, psychological resilience, and subjective well-being. Using SEM-PLS, the findings confirm that hospitableness can positively enhance social inclusion while mitigating loneliness. Contrary to our predication, however, our results fail to confirm the positive effect of hospitableness on subjective well-being both directly and indirectly mediated by self-esteem and social inclusion. Psychological resilience significantly moderates the relationship between hospitableness and social inclusion. The study makes significant theoretical contributions to the corpus of literature on the social outcomes of hospitableness and provides timely implications for policy makers to utilise “refugee hosting by locals” schemes and “private sponsorship of refugees” programmes as a viable solution to enhance refugees’ social inclusion and foster their overall well-being.