Measuring Community Cohesion

What is community cohesion and how do you measure it? Jo Richmond describes her experience in Oldham

One of the top priorities for Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council (OMBC) is to find ways to best support and encourage the development of a cohesive community and re-engage local people in the regeneration of the area.
Driven by OMBC’s need to measure progress locally the Community Cohesion Partnership, a thematic partnership of the Oldham Partnership (the local strategic partnership) tasked a small team within OMBC to begin the work of developing measures of community cohesion.

At the outset it was recognised that this was going to be neither easy nor straightforward. There were very few established or widely recognised techniques for measuring elements of community, in particular community cohesion. The starting point was to agree a definition of what community cohesion is.

We defined a cohesive community as a community:

· To which people are proud to say they belong;
· Where people from different ethnic, religious and social backgrounds and with different incomes live side by side in peace and safety;
· Which is not disfigured by racism or other forms of prejudice, and where people treat each other with courtesy and respect;
· Where people support each other when they are in need, and where conflicts can be resolved rather than festering or growing;
· Where people receive, and feel they receive, equality of treatment from organisations providing services, facilities and employment opportunities; and
· People are able to contribute to decisions that affect their lives, and to participate fully in the economic, social and cultural life of the community.

The piloting of the community indicators being co-ordinated by the Community Development Foundation (CDF) provided us with a reference point and we hope, in the future, some comparative data. In addition we have been working closely with Bury MBC, Rochdale MBC and the East Lancashire Partnership to develop a regional approach to measuring community cohesion.

We recognised that to measure this effectively we would require a combination of hard and soft indicators. We started with the easier of the two – the hard data. We examined what we already collect or have access to. Statistical information was grouped under each of the bullet points in our definition and then we sifted through, stripping out data that was interesting and useful but not specific to community cohesion issues. The types of data we decided to include are;

· Will forward tomorrow – need it off someone elses system who is off today.

We then looked at what we could only find out directly from local people. Measuring community cohesion, or any other element of community, cannot be done without including how people feel. This has proved the most resource intensive and also the most interesting in terms of process. As in all sectors, resources are tight and so our first attempt at getting peoples views was done though an established method regularly used within the Council. OMBC have a Citizens Panel that was established in 2002. It is a group of local residents from different areas, ages, ethnic backgrounds and income groups. The Panel totals approximately 1200 people and is primarily used to gather views on tangible issues such as issues such as council tax and budgets, crime and disorder, etc. This was the first time it had been used to gauge views, opinion and perception on issues such as race relations and diversity, fairness and equity, community engagement and local identity and pride.

The Panel took part in a postal survey, and after evaluation of the results we held some focus groups to look into some issues more deeply. The survey was an eight page document with a number of key areas;

· Your Neighbourhood: this included satisfaction levels, priorities for improvement, feelings of local identity and belonging, relationships between neighbours and people in the neighbourhood and personal safety
· Voluntary and Community Work; this clearly covers unpaid help to people who are not relatives and to support activities and causes.
· Community Togetherness; this included questions about the ethnic make up of the local neighbourhood, how well people get on, community spirit and perceived changes in local relationships
· Having your say: knowing how to change or influence decisions locally, experiences of this, who people would or do contact and whether they feel things are fair and equitable when local people are accessing services.

We had a surprisingly good response rate, over 65%. We believe that this was probably as a result of the subject matter being very relevant to the Oldham situation at present, and the more practical fact that the Panel had been recently replenished with new members – this would have been their first opportunity to take part.

The Community Indicators pilot being run by the CDF uses a number of standardised questions. The three we used are as follows:

Community influence -
Percentage of adults who feel they can influence decisions affecting their local area.

Community Cohesion
Percentage of people who feel that their local area is a place where people form different backgrounds can get on well together.

Social Capital
Percentage of people who have helped or been helped by others (unpaid and not relatives) over the last year.

The main challenge in using the survey model is representation. Even where the Panel is relatively representative of the local community, responses vary on issue to issue. Weightings are obviously used where responses are low but where there might be very small sample sizes results have to be treated with some care. Inevitably there are some members of the local community who find the use of postal surveys off putting. This may be because of language or literacy issues and/or cultural, age or disability-related barriers. The Council found that certain areas of the borough were over represented in the response rates and certain BME communities and younger people were less likely to complete and return the survey.

Follow up focus groups did prove successful in helping to gain a clearer understanding of people’s views, but findings are much harder to compare. Individual interviews would be a good approach if the resources were available.

The indicators will be most useful in helping to monitor the emerging Community Cohesion strategy document ‘Forward Together’. The resulting action plans are produced in a thematic way following the Oldham Partnership structure and all areas of action will have measurable outputs or outcomes, however, the bigger picture will be captured through the combination of statistical data analysis and something like the Citizens Panel approach.

Jo Richmond is Principal Officer of the Community Development Team of Oldham Council.

Contact: jo.richmond@oldham.gov.uk or 0161 911 4918.top

Good practice in research on refugees and asylum seekers

Guidelines agreed by the membership of the ESRC seminar series on eliciting the views of refugees and people seeking asylum

There has been an explosion of research on refugees and asylum seekers but, very frequently, research approaches may be inappropriate and unethical for a highly vulnerable and ever-changing population. It is for this reason that the ESRC have produced these guidelines.

As a whole, the following guidelines attempt to present the ideal research process. However in practice, we recognise that researchers are faced with limitations (often financial) that mean it is not necessarily possible for them to adhere to all the points that follow. In such circumstances, it would be helpful and ethical for the researcher to specify the constraints under which they are working and the effects of those constraints on the research. Research should be set within the professional ethics code of the appropriate professional body e.g. Social Research Association, the British Sociological Association etc.

Good practice in research projects: Approach

From the outset:

· States clearly what the researchers’ aims are and what they want to try and do with the research findings from the outset;
· Enables real informed consent of participants by researchers communicating about their funding sources and any conditions associated with the acceptance of those funds from the outset;
· The research should conform to data protection legislation;
· The research should set up procedures that ensure that agreements about confidentiality that are reached with involved refugee and asylum seeking people are adhered to;
· Aims to address issues that affect refugee and asylum seeking people and therefore includes the voices of refugee and people seeking asylum;
· Acknowledges that refugees and asylum seeking people have very valuable knowledge about the British system that derives from their own experience;
· Is open with refugee and asylum seeking people about the extent to which the researchers on the project intend to share the power to shape and influence the project;
· Knows what existing research in the area has shown and justifies its usefulness in terms of benefits to the people who are refugees and asylum seekers.

Is transparent and pro-active in consultation:

· Research that intends to consult with, rather than actively engage the participation of, refugee and people seeking asylum, makes this intention transparent from the outset;
· Research that intends actively to engage the participation of refugee and people seeking asylum, rather than merely consult with them, specifies how they are going to ensure the meaningful participation of refugee and asylum seeking people in collecting, analysing, reporting and disseminating research data and findings;
· Specifies which sections of communities/groups are being involved (e.g. self-appointed leaders, accountable leaders, voluntary organisation reps, women);
· Generates individual and community/group level capacity building e.g. helping the development of skills for creating and implementing action plans and/or initiating research themselves and/or advocacy capacity;
· Recognises that the refugee and asylum seeking communities/groups are heterogeneous i.e. there is no one community/group group or voice and therefore empowering one section of the community/group may cut across the position of another section;
· Describes how to include the involvement of refugee and asylum seeking people in developing their plans for feedback to communities/groups or groups who are the focus of their research;
· Describes how to include the involvement of refugee and asylum seeking people in developing their plans for dissemination, and who they want to disseminate to, from the outset.

Overall:

· Ensures that the project has adequate resources to achieve its aims. This is especially relevant when researching with/about a population group such as refugee and people seeking asylum. They may have many reasons for being wary of becoming involved in research/sharing their stories/describing how they feel and therefore require a large investment in the early stages of the project for them to become involved. In this way, the ‘hard-to-reach’ label ceases to function as a catch-all excuse for not involving refugee and asylum seeking people;
· Is open to different ways of seeing, interpreting and acting in the world so that the varying perspectives held by different people involved in the research are able to be articulated and demonstrated;
· Seeks to re-present information about refugee and asylum seeking people through the conscious use of positive language;
· Recognises that whilst researchers cannot control what is done with their research once it is in the public domain, they need to be aware of the wider political context concerning refugees and asylum seekers and responsibly thinks through the implications and impact of their findings.

Good practice in research projects: Methods

· Prepares and supports community/group researchers adequately by creating regular opportunities for community/group researchers to reflect on their own research activity with experienced and trustworthy colleagues and by integrating opportunities for the development of themselves and their communities/groups through the research;
· Matches method to purpose of research e.g. uses methods such as focus groups where the purpose is to generate and gather group data rather than record individual views; uses collaboratively developed closed questionnaires for individual views where appropriate;
· Is open to exploring different channels for contacting people for their involvement i.e. beyond the local community/group centre;
· Recognises that, because there are differences in the way the world is described in different languages, the language(s) used inside of the research process can effect the research findings;
· Articulates researchers understanding that the use of different methods can position those involved in power relationships with one another e.g. presenting quantitative/qualitative data using exclusive and technical, but actually unnecessarily complicated, jargon;
· Uses methods that draw out the differences in ways of seeing, interpreting and acting the world i.e. using techniques that make it possible for people to define their world in their own terms and not assuming that the researcher is the only/an expert;
· Specifies the effects that the choice of method has upon who from refugee and asylum seeking communities/groups can have a voice in the research and, conversely, who cannot;
· Values and accepts the description of experiences on their own terms, even if this does not build on prior established knowledge e.g.eviction into destitution is a new experience for refugees and asylum seekers in Britain and the methods selected for use should be chosen for their capacity to release new knowledge.

The ESRC seminar series has been running since 2002 and the guidelines were finalised following a presentation at the Home Office National Conference on Integration (29-30 June 2004). Representatives of organisations are invited to add in their names/organisations as supporting them. Deadline end of August.

Contact Rhetta.Moran R.Moran@salford.ac.uktop