Child Marriage in Crisis: How Syrian Refugees Are Using SenseMaker® to Break the Cycle
"Explore how a groundbreaking research project is empowering Syrian refugees in Lebanon to understand and address the complex issue of child marriage using a unique, community-driven approach."
The ongoing Syrian conflict has forced millions to flee their homes, with over 1.2 million seeking refuge in Lebanon. This mass displacement has created immense social and economic challenges, pushing vulnerable families to resort to desperate measures. Among these, child marriage has emerged as a worrying coping mechanism, with reported increases in prevalence and decreasing average age at marriage within Syrian refugee communities.
Traditional approaches to understanding and addressing child marriage often fall short due to the sensitive nature of the topic and the potential for biased responses. However, a pioneering research project implemented Cognitive Edge's SenseMaker®, a unique tool that collects mixed-methods data and empowers participants to self-interpret their experiences, offering a more nuanced and culturally-sensitive perspective on the factors driving child marriage in this vulnerable population.
This article examines the implementation of the SenseMaker® research project among Syrian refugees in Lebanon, exploring the tool's potential, challenges, and impact on understanding and addressing child marriage within this specific context. We delve into the project's methodology, data collection process, and key findings, offering insights into how community-driven approaches can be leveraged to create effective interventions and break the cycle of child marriage.
Scale and Drivers of Child Marriage
The Child Marriage Data Portal provides interactive, reliable, and up-to-date data on child marriage worldwide, while its data centre offers global, regional, and national datasets and monitoring resources. UNICEF defines marriage before age 18 as a fundamental violation of human rights and identifies interacting risk factors including poverty, perceptions of protection, family honor, social norms, customary or religious laws, weak legislation, and civil-registration systems. The Global Statistics source emphasizes that prevalence rates must be interpreted alongside population size: a lower national rate in a country of 1.4 billion people can represent more marriages in raw numbers than an 80% rate in a country of 25 million.
From Measurement to Local Understanding
The SenseMaker® project among Syrian refugees in Lebanon used Cognitive Edge’s tool to collect mixed-methods data about factors contributing to child marriage, with the stated aim of identifying local interventions and community actions. One source reports that early marriage prevalence increased and the average age of marriage decreased during the crisis, framing the project as an effort to understand those underlying factors in context. SenseMaker’s approach was presented as a complement to conventional methods because its combination of narrative collection and self-interpretation questions was intended to produce more nuanced responses than typical categorical questions.
An Evolving Field
The history of child-marriage research appears to be an evolving process rather than a single sequence of universally agreed milestones. Over time, attention has increasingly connected measurement with the social, legal, economic, and crisis conditions that shape marriage decisions. The available material does not provide enough source-specific detail to identify particular historical discoveries or dates confidently.
SenseMaker®: A New Approach to Understanding Child Marriage
SenseMaker® represents a paradigm shift in research methodologies, moving away from traditional top-down approaches and embracing a more participatory and context-driven model. The tool leverages a combination of qualitative and quantitative data collection techniques, empowering participants to share their personal stories and self-interpret their experiences through a series of guided questions.
- Capturing Nuance and Complexity: The open-ended nature of SenseMaker® questions allows participants to express their experiences in their own words, revealing the complex and interconnected factors driving child marriage within their communities.
- Reducing Researcher Bias: By empowering participants to self-interpret their narratives, SenseMaker® minimizes the potential for researcher bias and ensures that the findings are grounded in the lived realities of the affected population.
- Promoting Community Ownership: The participatory nature of SenseMaker® fosters a sense of ownership and agency among community members, encouraging them to become active participants in the research process and potential solutions.
- Generating Actionable Insights: The combination of qualitative and quantitative data generated by SenseMaker® provides a rich understanding of the issue, enabling researchers and practitioners to identify effective and culturally-appropriate interventions.
From Prevalence to Prevention Evidence
A 2023 systematic review described girl child marriage as a critical barrier to global public health and an expression of gender discrimination, while noting gaps in estimates and understanding of underlying factors. A 2022 field-mapping review examined research in four languages across peer-reviewed and other sources from major geographic regions. That review argues that the field should shift beyond diagnosing the problem toward building evidence about what works, while The Lancet reported that one in five girls, or 12 million per year, are married as children globally.
Context Is Not Optional
The SenseMaker® research project among Syrian refugees in Lebanon was designed to investigate underlying factors contributing to child marriage, but the available material does not establish that the tool alone produced a complete solution. Its proponents argued that triads, dyads, and stones allowed more varied responses and a more nuanced understanding than standard categorical questions. The Plan-UNHCR toolkit likewise stresses that context analysis should inform existing services and future prevention and response work grounded in operational reality, indicating that research must be connected to programming rather than treated as an endpoint.
SenseMaker Among Its Alternatives
The available comparison sources place SenseMaker within a broader market of research and experience-management software. G2 identifies Birdeye, Qualtrics Market Research, and Reputation among the leading SenseMaker alternatives, while SoftwareWorld presents a wider set of competing tools for comparison. These listings advertise comparisons involving features, pricing, reviews, or user votes, but the supplied material does not provide enough evidence to determine which platform is most appropriate for studying child marriage.
A Path Forward: Leveraging SenseMaker® for Lasting Change
The SenseMaker® project in Lebanon demonstrates the potential of community-driven research methodologies to address complex social issues within vulnerable populations. By empowering Syrian refugees to share their stories and self-interpret their experiences, the project has generated valuable insights into the drivers of child marriage and paved the way for culturally-sensitive interventions. Although the SenseMaker® tool has it's limitations, its flexibility to adapt to various settings, it remains an important asset for maintaining good team communication, reporting and supporting the research teams.
A Humanitarian Research Experiment
The SenseMaker® project among Syrian refugees in Lebanon was intended to understand the factors contributing to child marriage through a novel research tool in a humanitarian setting. Its significance lies in examining how a research process can be implemented where displacement and crisis shape the problem being studied. The source describes the project as an effort to generate understanding that can support responses, rather than as a standalone measure of prevalence.
Sustaining Progress and Improving Evidence
UNICEF reported that the proportion of young women married as children declined from 25% to approximately 21% during the decade covered by its 2018 trends report, while approximately 650 million girls and women alive at that time had married before age 18. UNICEF’s future-oriented reporting frames ending child marriage by 2030 as requiring attention to both progress and the work still ahead. Future monitoring can also draw on downloadable global, regional, and national datasets and on SenseMaker use cases developed through Plan International’s Child Marriage in Humanitarian Settings Initiative.
Research in a Humanitarian Setting
The SenseMaker® manuscript on Syrian refugees in Lebanon examines the implementation of a novel research tool in a humanitarian setting. Its stated purpose was to understand the underlying factors contributing to child marriage among Syrian refugees, linking the research design to a crisis-affected population rather than treating child marriage as context-free. The available sources do not supply enough detail to specify every institutional or operational barrier, but they establish that humanitarian context is central to the project.
People Interpreting Their Own Experiences
The Cynefin Co describes SenseMaker® as a way to gather both qualitative and quantitative data about people’s observations and experiences. A defining feature is that participants analyse their own responses, producing what the source characterizes as authentic human analyses rather than interpretations imposed externally. This design places lived experience at the centre of the evidence collected, although the supplied source does not independently quantify its impact on child-marriage outcomes.