Capturing the impact of housing

The Week in Housing 03/11/23

Before we get started, just a quick note to say that I am always open to working with potential PhD students interested in doing research on housing and/or urban developed. Get in touch if this is something you are considering. Also, I’m now on Blue Sky (@mickbyrne).

We are all aware of how important housing is across multiple aspects of health and well being. But given these things are somewhat slippery and hard to define, and that housing itself is multidimensional and complex, how should we understand, measure or otherwise capture the impact of housing? I’ve never really done any ‘evaluation’ style research, but a project I’m working on at the moment has an evaluative dimension, and has given me the opportunity to dip into some of the literature in the area. This discussion is also timely, because Clúid, Respond and Circle have just published this new framework for capturing the impact of AHBs (which I haven’t had a chance to read yet).

One approach that struck me as very useful, especially for more qualitative oriented researchers such as myself, is called ‘realist evaluation’. Rolfe et al’s Housing as a social determinant of health and wellbeing develops this approach in the context of housing.

Realist Evaluation (RE) is designed to examine the impact of interventions (such as Government policies or the provision of a given form of housing or housing support) on ‘complex phenomena’, e.g. where the impact of a given intervention may be (a) complex; (b) multi-dimensional; (c) dynamic, i.e. the overall impact is mediated by the interaction of different aspects and dimensions, and cannot be reduced to any one aspect; (d) impacted by the agency of the recipients of the intervention, in our case residents.

The point of RE is not so much to measure or quantify the impact of a given intervention, for example the ‘amount’ of wellbeing generated by social housing, but rather to “uncover and understand the causal processes and mechanisms at play within any policy or programme”. It is more focused on understanding how and why an intervention has a given impact, rather than measuring the extent of that impact.

This more theoretical and qualitative approach seems to me more valuable then more quantitative approaches, which often try to ascribe a monetary value to the impacts of housing interventions (such as provision of social housing), even inherently non-monetary impacts such as well being, or community participation. These approaches, at least in the UK, are often influenced by the work of HACT. Ascribing a quantitative or monetary value to housing interventions can help to articulate the value of something multifaceted and sometimes intangible, like housing, in a language that policymakers understand (for a good example of how this can be done, check out this report by Gibb et al.) But to my mind, there is always something fundamentally arbitrary about claims, for example, that a given housing intervention can generate well-being equal to €20,000 per resident.

In terms of how RE approaches this challenge, there are two aspects of the approach worth highlighting:

1.       Rather than seeking to isolate causal relationships from contexts, this approach views context as crucial to understanding how social mechanisms operate and have impact. So it seeks to capture how a given intervention works within a specific context, rather than trying to ‘control’ for contextual influences:

“Realist evaluation deliberately incorporates context to examine how it influences the operation of causal mechanisms. Thus, the realist evaluation position is that research needs to focus not on whether programs work in a general sense but on “what works, for whom, in what circumstances”... This is particularly valuable in situations where interventions and context are interconnected in complex ways, such as social situations where the intervention is shaped by the agency of the beneficiary” (all quotes are from the Rolfe et al. article linked above)

2.       RE recognizes that some of the key mechanisms or causal pathways through which a given intervention has an impact will not be directly observable. Therefor they need to be captured theoretically:

“[Re]alist evaluation recognizes that most mechanisms will be hidden. Whilst many elements of social reality, such as human behaviour and activities of institutions are directly observable, mechanisms which generate social outcomes are often hidden within individual reasoning or complex organisational interactions, and hence are not necessarily tangible… The invisible nature of mechanisms arises because they (often) operate at different levels of the system then the outcome, they operate at different timescales to the outcome, and they depend on relationships and interactions, some of which cannot be observed… [This] highlights the need for theory to provide an explanation.”

RE thus focuses on “how causal mechanisms may operate to generate outcomes within particular contexts.”

In terms of research design, this means that RE typically incorporates the following steps:

1.       Initial theories about the impact of an intervention are developed, based on existing evidence and/or stakeholder engagement. For example, it could be theorized that secure housing will lead to a variety of outcomes including better ontological security, better engagement with employment, better community integration etc. And these could all, in turn, be theorized as feeding into enhanced well being.

2.       Quantitative research, i.e. surveys (usually) are used to identify patterns of outcomes, i.e. to identify relationships between a given intervention, or aspect of an intervention, and a given outcome. For example, to see if residents who have gained access to secure housing do in fact feel a greater sense of security, or a greater attachment to place.

3.       These patterns are then further explored using qualitative data to “elucidate the underlying mechanisms’ through which interventions produce outcomes, i.e. how and in what way does secure housing translate into a given outcome, and in what context.

The Rolfe et al. article sets out the appropriateness of the RE approach in the context of analyzing the ‘less tangible’ impacts of housing on the following basis:

·         The causal pathways from housing to health are inherently complex.

·         Housing interventions are ‘multifaceted and complex, in the sense that there are multiple, interacting components, including the agency of tenants and housing staff’.

·         Residents are agents and therefore their housing experience is a function of the interaction of experience, subjectivity and the actual delivery of housing. It will thus be mediated by a wide variety of factors that would shape or manifest in the residents’ experience.

Events & News

Threshold will launch their annual report on Wednesday, November 15th at 11am. Details to follow, but a panel of academics (including myself) will take part in a discussion on the future of the PRS. Clúid recently held their Simon Brooke seminar on the issue of Youth Housing and Homelessness, following on from their event early in the year on the same issue. You can now watch the seminar here. Last week I mentioned new research on the impact of PRS housing on health - this online event with the authors of that research will present the findings and discuss implications for policy.

What I’m reading

I have a chapter in this new edited volume, Private Renting in the Advanced Economies. It takes a look at the PRS across a host of countries, and is well worth a look if you want to get your head around how the sector is evolving internationally. Threshold’s Q3 report was published this week.