Assessment

WP 7 - assessment

The hypothesis that art is good for cross-cultural adaptation is both a plausible and attractive one; however, up to the present few empirical evidence has been presented to support it.  This should not come as a surprise neither for specialists of art interventions nor trainers involved in the accompaniment of immigrants: both the genre of art interventions and the target group of migrants are thought of as notoriously difficult to assess, let alone art interventions for migrants.  
Here are some of the challenges:
a)    The main goal of art interventions here is not the development of concrete skills that could be evaluated against an objective benchmark, rather indicators of well-being and adaptation which take a longer time to show.  To focus our work we have put together a list of indicators based on secondary research on the literature of cross-cultural adaptation
b)    Working with newcomers implies working with a multicultural group, for which regularly validated psychological scales, tools may not be adapted.  Cross-cultural differences of self-perception, self-expression, emotional vocabulary etc. may bias the tools.  Linguistic difficulties or lack of sufficient writing / reading skills could also appear.  
Against all odds, our project has implanted itself the mission to develop pilot training sessions based on art and create methodologies to assess them.
Anticipating the challenges we may face we have adopted an assessment toolbox with many layers and options.  Parallel to our pilot workshops the assessment methods are themselves assessed: some prove difficult if not impossible to pursue while others seem to unfold and develop well.

We present bellow the four layers of the planned assessment methodology.  These are the tools we started with.  After the pilot sessions end, we’ll be able to further elaborate the assessment tools and add observations on how they worked.  

1/ Assessment of the impact of the sessions

A)    Quantitative approach: using a pre- and post test
B)    Qualitative approach: case studies following a methodology of own choice

2/ Visual - multimedia documentation of the process of the workshops

3/ Handwritten subjective reflections of the participants / artists / facilitators involved

4/ Assessment with the facilitators’ team

You can find here the whole assessment guideline