The Immigrant Integration Index is designed to be easily implemented by researchers and practitioners working across a range of settings. This page provides a list of common steps and considerations for use.

Watch the recording of our webinar on how to adapt the Index to different languages and country contexts. Access the slides here.

1. Ethical and practical considerations

• Access: how will participants be identified and contacted?
• Mode: conduct survey by phone, Whatsapp, e-mail/online (e.g., via Qualtrics), or in-person
• Consent: obtain active opt-in of participants
• Privacy and Confidentiality: ensure anonymity and data protections
• Approvals: obtain all necessary ethical (e.g., IRB) approvals from your institution
• Question order: randomize the question order for different respondents

2. Select the IPL-12 or the IPL-24

• Both indexes produce a single measure of integration between 0 and 1.
• As the IPL-12 is a subset of the IPL-24, the scores are highly correlated. Since the IPL-24 takes three times as long to administer, it is usually sufficient to use the IPL-12.
• If a certain integration dimension is of special interest and should be measured with more precision, the additional IPL-24 questions from the respective dimension can be added.

3. Translate the tool

• Offer the questionnaire in the native language of the respondents, at a level that is easy to understand

4. Country Name:

• Adapt to the country of research and the host country’s citizens (e.g. Greeks instead of Americans).
• The index prioritizes simplicity and defines rooted populations as people who have the citizenship of the host country (e.g., Americans and not just American citizens by birth).

5. Linguistic Dimension:

• In cases where there are 2 or more+ official languages, the language referenced in the survey should be the language migrants will need to understand important legal information, speak with authorities, and succeed in the workplace.

6. Economic Dimension:

• When asking respondents for their household income, gross (pre-tax) household income (as opposed to net) should be used because it is most common in employment contracts and is what respondents are most likely to remember.
• In contexts where net income is what people remember, net income can be used, so long as data on net median local household income is available for scoring.
• Answers on income are scored in relation to the local household income. The amount of the (gross) median local household income should be adapted to the context and put in five income categories. Possible sources are census data, the national statistical office, the country’s central bank, and other academic articles.
• The term “household” is described to respondents as “everyone with whom you share an apartment or house and with whom you are also related by birth, marriage, partnership, or adoption.” For each new study, users should review if this description makes sense in a given context or if it should be altered.
• When asking about respondents’ employment status, some answer options might be implausible in a given context and can be removed. Generally, a score of one is assigned if a respondent is unemployed and has no other daily activity that keeps them from working. A score of three is assigned if a respondent is in unpaid work (e.g., domestic care work), in school, or is unemployed due to sickness, disability, or old age. A score of five is assigned if a respondent is employed or earns an income in a different way (e.g., through military service).

7. Political Dimension:

• Requires a good understanding of the context the population of interest lives in. Pay particular attention to these questions in the pilot survey and remove them if needed.
• Sometimes the political situation may have severely affected the target population to the point that it may be better to drop the IPL-24 questions of that dimension and just keep the IPL-12 ones, or remove this set of questions entirely.

8. Navigational Dimension:

• These questions must be adapted to the local context. If the original questions work for a given context, then only the answers need to be adapted (e.g. it is common to send letters in France, but addresses look different than in the U.S.).
• If the original questions do not work in the context of interest, users can design new questions. Examples can be found in the survey instruments for Brazil, Peru and Dominican Republic on the IPL Integration Index website.
• When designing new questions, pay attention to the difficulty level of the question. They have to be specific to a context but very much common knowledge in the given context. One way to test this is to pilot the survey.

9. Adding or Removing Questions:

• Do not drop questions unless they might put respondents at risk and/or are deemed too sensitive. Even if there will be little variation in responses (e.g. the population of interest does not have political rights in the host country), it is still better to keep the question.
• The index was not designed to capture all possible aspects of migrant integration. Adding questions is fine as long as they are not used in the calculation of the index and they do not measure similar concepts as the integration index questions.
• It is best to use pre-tested questions, which can be found in the Global Survey Bank on Migrant Integration and Social Cohesion or other surveys on migrant integration.

10. Calculating Scores:

• The IOM/IPL Integration Index Calculator shows how the index scoring works using an example from an IOM/IPL survey on integration implemented in Brazil.