Daily Psychological Wellbeing among Asylum Seekers in Emergency Reception Centers: A Mixed-Methods Pilot Study

Asylum seekers residing in Extraordinary Reception Centres (CAS) in Italy face a distinctive constellation of post-migration stressors — legal uncertainty, enforced inactivity, social isolation, and highly variable access to psychosocial support — that have been consistently linked to elevated psychological distress. Yet the daily dynamics of this relationship remain poorly understood. Most existing research relies on single-occasion retrospective measures, which cannot capture how mood, rumination, worry, and social experience fluctuate across the days of a waiting period, or how individual psychological resources shape that fluctuation. This study addresses these gaps through a longitudinal mixed-methods pilot design conducted with adult male asylum seekers in CAS facilities in the Veneto region of Italy. The study combines a 14-day repeated daily self-report assessment protocol administered via the M-Path application with pre- and post-measurement baseline questionnaires and a participatory action research component structured around participatory circles with a distinct group of co-researchers. Four research questions guide the study. The first asks what structural and experiential priorities asylum seekers identify as central to their daily psychological wellbeing in emergency reception contexts, addressed through reflexive thematic analysis of participatory circle transcripts. The second examines the feasibility of the EMA protocol with this population, including compliance rates and dropout. The third examines whether baseline psychological distress levels, measured by the Refugee Health Screener-15, are associated with daily rumination and worry across the assessment period. The fourth investigates how sense of belonging, measured at pre-test using the Cultural and Social Belonging Scale, is associated with daily mood and perceived social isolation during the assessment period. Qualitative data from the participatory circles were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Quantitative analyses for the third and fourth questions use two-level multilevel modelling implemented in R. The study contributes to a small but growing body of literature on intensive longitudinal methods with forced migrant populations, and responds to a concrete policy context in which successive legislative reforms have progressively reduced the mandatory psychosocial service baseline in Italian reception facilities. Findings are expected to inform both the methodological literature on ecological momentary assessment with vulnerable populations and the applied literature on psychosocial wellbeing in CAS contexts. Keywords: Asylum Seekers, EMA, Wellbeing, Post-Migration, Participatory Action Research.