Cohousing and case management for unaccompanied young adult refugees in Antwerp. Groundwork for evaluation and literature study (CeMIS)

How to stimulate unaccompanied young adult refugees’ inclusion in society? This report discusses cohousing and case management for unaccompanied young adult refugees in Antwerp (CURANT), a social policy intervention combining intensive individualized guidance, cohabitation with a local flatmate, training and therapy with the aim of supporting social integration. The stakeholders’ underlying assumptions are untangled, and the intervention’s core ideas are connected with academic literature.

This report concerns the social policy intervention Cohousing and case management for Unacompanied young adult refugees in Antwerp (CURANT). CURANT is an innovative urban intervention offering various types of support to unaccompanied young adult refugees in the city of Antwerp (Flanders, Belgium).

A consortium of six institutions is responsible for the implementation of CURANT, among which  CeMIS, the Centre for Migration and Intercultural Studies of the University of Antwerp, that is involved as the evaluator.

'Groundwork for evaluation and literature study' presents the first step of a theory-driven evaluation study examining CURANT. During the three-year implementation of this intervention (from 1st of November 2016 to 31st of October 2019), various other reports will be published including a first (after 1 year) and second (after 2 years) evaluation report.

The report offers a concise descriptive introduction to CURANT first, including among others a brief overview of the above-mentioned stakeholder organizations, basic information on the resources of the project and limited contextual information. Second, the report discusses the stakeholders’ change model, i.e., a causal theory incorporating the stakeholders’ assumptions and expectations regarding the intervention. It is an inductively produced theoretical model whose creation was facilitated by researchers (the authors of this report) but grounded firmly in the stakeholders’ ideas. Drawing on the stakeholders’ change model, the third section of the report highlights some of the central concepts and dynamics of the change model and relates these to academic understandings. The authors present an overview of academic literature on refugee integration processes and related public policies. As such, it provides the scientific backbone to the stakeholder-based theory on CURANT.

 

Publication Date:
Tue 02 May 2017
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