February 14, 2019

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Stanford have also been working with ETH Zurich to develop a tool known as the Integration Index, which aims to measure the level of integration of migrants into their host communities.

The tool consists of a survey that measures the integration of migrants via both a 12-item and 24-item survey that aims to measure integration along six dimensions: psychological, economic, political, social, linguistic, and navigational.  The survey was compiled after testing on around 4,000 individuals, and whilst it’s always going to be difficult to provide a perfect measure of something so fiendishly complex, the team believe it does a good job.

“What you hope to demonstrate in testing the validity of the index is that it shows higher-levels of integration where you would expect, such as naturalized citizens having higher-levels of integration than recently-arrived immigrants,” they explain.

The initial testing found that the survey was as capable of predicting integration as more commonly used methods, such as citizenship and language skills.  The ultimate goal is to create a sufficiently reliable tool to enable government agencies, nonprofit service providers and academic researchers to gain a greater understanding of integration, which can in turn better inform policy decisions.

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