Period
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Funding entity:
Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa
Abstract:
CoLABOR developed the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) for the Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa (SCML), with the aim of improving knowledge about the population it supports and enhancing the distribution of social support and intervention work among different teams and technicians. Given that this institution provides social services in various areas of intervention to populations that frequently exhibit vulnerabilities in different spheres of life (e.g., health, housing, employment, income), with multiple interdependencies, the SVI had to be able to capture the vulnerability of each user in a systematic and integrated way.
The architecture of the IVS thus combines several thematic Vulnerability Indices – Economic IV, Health IV, Housing IV, and Violence and Neglect IV – which are linked to different problems or events (e.g., risk of poverty, mental health problems, homelessness, victimization by abuse). These thematic Vulnerability Indices then converge into a synthetic measure of overall vulnerability – the synthetic IVS, which aggregates the results of each of the thematic IVs.
The developed instrument measures, on the one hand, the absolute vulnerability of each individual in various dimensions, taking into account all the information available through the (anonymized) administrative data of the institution and, on the other hand, integrates a predictive (probabilistic) component of possible future vulnerabilities, which results from the inferential analysis of individual and family characteristics in relation to the patterns identified in the universe of users.
Its versatility allows for assessing the vulnerability of people/families/territories in various dimensions (economy, health, housing and violence), with a simultaneously analytical and prospective approach, which makes it possible to use it as a diagnostic, management, monitoring and quasi-experimental evaluation tool for interventions, both at the level of the problems and their multiple causal factors.
Partner institutions:
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CoLABOR Team
Bárbara Ferreira (coordination)
Sónia Costa (co-coordination)
Luís Manso
Frederico Cantante
Tânia Almeida
Tiago Teixeira
Clara Oliveira
Results
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