Soft Indicators Study

The ASPIRE programme was designed to test out innovative approaches towards helping asylum seekers and refugees (ASRs) to make connections with their host community in order to support the integration process.

Measuring the effectiveness of such interventions can pose significant challenges because the integration of ASRs is complex and often fraught with difficulty, for both the person arriving in this country and the people trying to provide support (Department for Work and Pensions, 2005; Home Office, 2005; 2007).

Indicators to assess how far ASPIRE funded projects have benefited ASRs in developing social bonds, bridges and links with their host community need to take account of a dual challenge faced by ASRs: making connections with people with whom they share geographic, ethnic, religious or other characteristics, and at the same time making connections with their host community, which may consist of settled white or black residents.

While conventional performance assessments of European Union funded programmes such as ASPIRE rely on primarily quantitative or ‘hard’ performance measures, there is a growing recognition that qualitative, or ‘soft’ measures of performance are a means of providing important evidence of programme impact.

The application of such soft indicators of performance (SIPs) poses a number of challenges however, not least because of the perceived subjective nature of such indicators, and the requirement to use indicators that are specifically developed for a particular project or programme.

It is in this context that the ASPIRE Development Partnership identified a need to develop SIPs to measure the effectiveness of the support provided for ASRs through ASPIRE funded projects and therefore commissioned this study.

This study had the purpose of developing measures of performance which would be capable of providing evidence of the progress made, or ‘the distance travelled’, by ASRs towards their integration through the ASPIRE funded projects.

The aim of this study was to develop SIPs and test these on ASPIRE funded projects with the objective exploring their utility as performance measures, as a first step towards the establishment of a complementary performance measurement approach for other programmes aimed at supporting ASRs.

Find out more by downloading the full report (PDF file)