Measuring What Matters: Data Politics and Data Justice In Refugee Resettlement Research

This roundtable explores and problematizes measurement decisions in refugee resettlement research and how they shape both evidence and narrative. While this roundtable focuses on refugee resettlement, questions of measurement are relevant for all social work domains of inquiry. We ask: What counts as rigorous measurement? How do data infrastructures influence what becomes measurable and therefore actionable? What does “doing good” look like in measurement practice? What does “rigor” mean, and who defines it? We consider ways through which researchers can design, implement, and interpret measures to better align constructs with lived experience, and address what is often overlooked, and support more meaningful policy and practice. Measurement choices are never neutral, nor simply technical. The constructs built into surveys, scales, and evaluation frameworks help determine what can be known, compared, and acted upon, while also influencing how refugee lives are understood and represented. When dominant measures privilege institutional priorities over community realities, they risk narrowing the field’s understanding of need, adaptation, and well-being. As a result, questions of measurement are also questions of narrative, legitimacy, and power. This roundtable interrogates what it means for measurement to be designed to redistribute, share, co-produce epistemic power/authority, rather than reinforce existing knowledge hierarchies.

The first presentation uses a federally-administered dataset (i.e., Annual Survey of Refugees) to examine how data infrastructures shape what counts as valid knowledge and predictive rigor in resettlement. Drawing on original analysis, it shows that conventional models are systematically limited in their predictive capacity, particularly for minoritized women, and that the dataset’s architecture reproduces construct bias and epistemic distortion by privileging economic self-sufficiency. The second presentation describes a multi-year effort to develop a culturally responsive and contextually specific social support scale centered on women, highlighting key moments in which the research team paused to reconsider and modify standard scale development methods before proceeding. It argues that rigor may require methodological restraint as much as procedural precision, and that priorities expressed by resettled communities are often not the priorities of funders. The third presentation argues for moving beyond “do no harm” toward a “doing good” approach rooted in ethical, anti-oppressive, and equitable research. Reflecting on two decades of community-based research and organizing, it shows how institutional metrics of success erase community-level impacts and elaborates the importance of critical reflexivity in centering the voices of refugee communities and scholars with lived experience. The fourth presentation offers a brief theoretical grounding in science studies, situating questions of measurement within a broader inquiry into knowledge production in social work and attending to both the profession’s ethical imperatives and the political economy and social history of research.

These presentations collectively challenge the idea that measurement is simply a technical matter. The roundtable raises critical questions about how measurement may reproduce harm even when well-intentioned, and about what it would mean to design research that is not only methodologically sound but also ethically grounded, contextually responsive, and accountable to the communities whose experiences and ways of knowing are too often left out of view.