Oct. 21, 2025 | Ethan Simmons
‘This was by far the most difficult and I think impactful work that I have done’
Sitting face-to-face with Ukrainian refugees who had escaped to Poland after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Recreation, Sport and Tourism Professor Monika Stodolska asked a set of questions many of them hadn’t considered. Namely, what do you do in your leisure time?
She wanted to understand what they had done to cope with their psychological trauma from the conflict, and whether their participation in leisure activities had helped to relieve some of the stress they’d experienced. But Stodolska wasn’t prepared for how difficult it would be to even broach the subject, or how the refugees’ reactions would affect her personally.
“The look on their faces when I asked that really stuck with me. ‘How can you even be asking about leisure when everything else is going on, when my family lives on the front lines, when I’m separated from my children?’” Stodolska said. “I knew as a researcher how important leisure can be in helping people cope with those most difficult moments in their lives. But these people didn’t realize that.”
Stodolska, professor of RST at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, researches how leisure and recreation can improve health and well-being, especially among racially and ethnically minoritized populations. In 2025, she released the first paper in a series studying the human consequences of the Russian war on Ukraine, specifically in the neighboring country of Poland.
By Feb. 2024, more than 18.8 million Ukrainians had crossed the country’s border with Poland since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. By Sept. 2025, roughly 993,000 Ukrainian refugees remained in Poland under temporary protected status, with the majority resettling elsewhere or returning to Ukraine. (Germany is the only country with more Ukrainian refugees, at nearly 1.2 million).
In the fall of 2022, Stodolska—who happened to be on sabbatical—traveled back to her home country of Poland and began conducting in-depth interviews with three groups of people who were thrust into action as the war intensified.
She interviewed Ukrainian refugees who moved westward to Poland to escape the war, administrators of the aid effort such as Polish city mayors and organizers of mass refugee shelters, and “helpers,” Polish residents who housed refugees when the conflict escalated and volunteers who assisted the aid effort at home or on the frontlines.
Her first paper in the series, “The Roles of Leisure in Trauma Coping Among Ukrainian War Refugees in Poland,” was published in the journal Leisure Sciences this April. The paper contains firsthand narratives from her interviews with the Ukrainian refugees, which took place from Nov. 2022 to May 2023.
Among the 21 refugees she interviewed for the study, 19 were women, matching the ratio of Ukrainians initially displaced by the war. Until this August, men of military age were not allowed to leave Ukraine while the fighting continued.
Stodolska conducted interviews in a mix of Polish, English and some Russian, while research assistant Tala Naumovska, from the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures, conducted interviews with subjects who spoke only Ukrainian.
Using Lazarus and Folkman’s framework to explain how individuals cope with psychological stress, Stodolska divided their leisure activities into either emotion-focused or problem-focused coping. The emotion-focused coping, among others, included checking Ukrainian news or staying in touch with family and friends, while problem-focused coping included collecting materials that could be sent the war’s frontlines, using leisure to build a sense of belonging, and traveling across Poland to learn about their new environment.
“We knew that leisure is a good buffer against trauma,” she said. “But there was so much more that surfaced in this study.”
Many of the refugees she interviewed developed strong relationships with their Polish host families, and found purpose in joining the community’s volunteer activities for the war effort, such as weaving camouflage nets intended for the war’s trenches.
Stodolska was continually struck by the immense humanitarian response she witnessed in the wake of the second invasion of Ukraine.
“It was not only the Polish population—Czech, Slovaks, Germans, everyone wanted to help. The scale and magnitude of the assistance that was given to people was just extraordinary,” Stodolska said. “To me, it was not only extremely moving from a humanitarian perspective, but from a research perspective, I thought that this was unprecedented and needed to be studied.”
But the process of acclimation was painstaking for many of the refugees, who often struggled to find purpose in their free time. Eartha, a 38-year-old mother who escaped from Ukraine with her three children, compared leisure activities like visiting the local park or zoo to “doing time” in prison while awaiting her return.
“Because it’s like you don’t live, you’re just there, you’re just passing the time. You’re ‘doing time’. I mean, you’re safe; everything is fine, but you are just like a piece of paper,” Eartha said in her interview.
What has lingered with Stodolska are the traumatic memories of escape her interviewees recalled. Three years after beginning this study, she feels irrevocably changed.
“This was my first encounter with people who just crossed the border escaping death,” Stodolska said. “The gruesome stories that they were telling me, people whose families were murdered or who witnessed death during the escape … I was shell-shocked doing this study.”
“I’ve studied race and ethnicity and discrimination for decades now, but this was by far the most difficult and I think impactful work that I have done.”
The look on their faces really stuck with me. ‘How can you even be asking about leisure when everything else is going on, when my family lives on the front lines, when I’m separated from my children?
Monika Stodolska
Professor of Recreation, Sport and TourismWhile working on her second paper chronicling Polish “helpers” of Ukrainian refugees, Stodolska decided to pause and reevaluate. Polish citizens’ attitudes toward Ukrainian refugees who had settled in the country have deteriorated in the last year, Stodolska said, and she wants to return this fall to collect more data to trace the reasons for this shift.
“They were, at the beginning of the conflict, incredibly supportive and pro-Ukrainian, including here in the United States, but especially in Eastern Europe. The narrative was, ‘They’re fighting our war. Poland is next, right?’,” Stodolska said. “However, we have since seen a marked shift in the attitudes towards migrants—to the point where the majority of the Polish population says that they want the refugees to leave and go back home.”
Why the shift? New perceptions have emerged in Poland and in the region; that Ukrainian refugees are a drain on the country’s resources, or that they’re receiving preferential treatment through government assistance programs. In an opinion poll from the Warsaw-based Centre for Public Opinion Research, 50% of Poles believed the scale of government assistance for Ukrainian refugees was “too great” in general, while 58% believed Ukrainian refugees must work to receive social benefits.
Stodolska is planning to re-interview many of the Poles who brought Ukrainian refugees into their homes and who offered assistance through other means, and ask, “if you were in this situation again, would you still help to the extent you did?”
“I want to have two snapshots in time,” she said. “Take a more longitudinal approach.”
While war negotiations remain at a standstill, the suffering continues. Yet, as Stodolska wrote in the closing paragraph of her paper, Ukrainian refugees’ experiences are only the tip of the iceberg: more than 100 million people globally have been forcibly displaced worldwide by war, oppression and persecution.
She wrote that it was her “sincere wish” that research on refugees was not needed, but that until they are able to return to their homelands, “their fight for survival and dignity [must be] brought to the witness of the world.”
“Don’t lose interest, don’t lose compassion. Compassion is never wrong. Doing the right thing is never wrong,” Stodolska said. “Research is only one tool of that. If I can use research to make sure that this stays in the news cycle, and that people don’t lose interest in helping Ukraine or helping other people who are in need, I’ve done my job.”
Editor’s note:
To contact Monika Stodolska, email stodolsk@illinois.edu
The paper “The Roles of Leisure in Trauma Coping Among Ukrainian War Refugees in Poland” is available online.
DOI: 10.1080/01490400.2025.2487070
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