Accounting for Context, Culture, and Stress In Asylum Client Interviews: A Hands-on Workshop Using the CIAS Practitioner Toolkit

Introduction/Background: Asylum seekers in the United States are commonly assessed against expectations of coherent, chronological, internally consistent testimony. Yet trauma exposure, shame, interpreter mediation, language barriers, developmental history, and structural precarity can all disrupt recall and disclosure. Without credibility-sensitive documentation tools to contextualize these constraints, interdisciplinary asylum teams may record narratives in ways that unintentionally increase client exposure to adverse credibility findings. This workshop responds to that gap by introducing a structured practice instrument developed through a CBPR-informed iterative co-design process with community-based interdisciplinary practitioners serving asylum-seeking populations across legal and social work settings.

Purpose: This workshop introduces the CIAS Practitioner Toolkit, grounded in the Contextual Influence in Acculturative Stress framework (Bekteshi and Kang, 2020). Participants will learn to: (1) use a staged interviewing approach that separates intake triage from later narrative development, including an abbreviated pathway for detained and high-caseload settings where standard multi-meeting frameworks are not feasible; (2) document delayed disclosure, chronology gaps, and interpreter- and language-related effects using neutral, non-blaming, legally useful language that protects clients from adverse credibility findings; and (3) distinguish core versus peripheral inconsistencies when reviewing declarations and preparing clients for affidavit development or testimony, while maintaining cultural responsiveness and community health equity principles throughout.

Methods/Format/Pedagogy: The workshop is team-taught by facilitators with expertise in social work research, immigration law, clinical mental health practice with survivors of torture and political persecution, and community health equity. This interdisciplinary facilitation model embodies the cross-disciplinary collaboration the toolkit is designed to enable in practice. Pedagogy is experiential and method-focused: brief teaching, modeling of interdisciplinary documentation cross-walks, guided tool practice, discipline-specific small-group work, and structured reflection. To support replication, facilitators demonstrate the toolkit's CBPR-informed iterative co-design process, including stakeholder mapping, rapid-cycle feedback loops through practitioner workshops, consultations, and key-informant interviews with practitioners representing legal, clinical, and anthropological expertise, and structured synthesis using a Master Feedback Tracker.

Participant Activities: Phase 1 introduces the CIAS framework and demonstrates how developmental, cultural, economic, and U.S. climate contexts shape testimony, disclosure, and credibility interpretation, using case vignettes drawn directly from practitioner feedback during co-design. Phase 2 engages participants in a shared case scenario using selected toolkit tools including the intake triage screen, staged prompt bank, delayed disclosure barriers checklist, core-versus-peripheral discrepancy matrix, and interpreter effects observation guidance, followed by discipline-specific small groups and cross-group synthesis exploring how documentation choices in each discipline actively support the other's work. Phase 3 is a structured debrief focused on adapting tools and the CBPR co-design workflow for legal aid, private practice, interdisciplinary clinics, detained cases, and other applied settings.

Expected Outcomes/Takeaways: Participants leave with selected toolkit materials, a concise implementation guide, and a transferable CBPR-informed workflow for ongoing adaptation under real-world constraints. At a time of intensifying asylum restriction, growing administrative backlog, and erosion of due process in detained settings, this session demonstrates how social work research can produce usable interdisciplinary tools that protect vulnerable clients, strengthen credibility-sensitive advocacy, and uphold the democratic values and common good the field was built to serve.