Adapting and Validating a Survey to Assess Host Communities Support for Migration

Abstract

Migration presents challenges to receiving communities, as it tests their ability to respond to unexpected expenditures and social stresses. Evaluating the local impact of rapid and substantial migration flows is difficult due to the absence of a validated instrument for assessing community support for migration. Our study adapted and validated a Support for Migration Assessment survey (SMA) based on Social Exchange Theory (SET). The validation of the SMA contributes in two significant ways. First, it establishes an instrument that enables the assessment of support for migration (SFM) by considering community-level factors: trust in institutions (TII), overall community satisfaction (OCS), and perceived negative impact on infrastructure (INF). Second, the SMA extends SET to the context of migration to assess support by a receiving community. We recruited 333 survey participants between January and July 2022 using proportional stratified random sampling to measure locals’ perceptions toward the Venezuelan migrant population in Barranquilla, Colombia. The internal consistency of the factors was calculated with Cronbach’s alpha (α) and omega coefficient (ω), resulting in α = 0.88, ω = 0.89 for TII; α = 0.90, ω = 0.92 for OCS; α = 0.87, ω = 0.88 for INF; and α = 0.84, ω = 0.86 for SFM. After conducting exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, construct validity was confirmed based on the model’s goodness of fit (CFI = 0.939, TLI = 0.935, RMSEA = 0.062, SRMR = 0.076). The adapted survey demonstrates adequacy in assessing perceived community support for migration.