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Tools for social policy management: the SiSo Scale for measuring situations of social difficulty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2021

ESTHER RAYA DIEZ Open the ORCID record for ESTHER RAYA DIEZ [Opens in a new window]  and
AURELIO LASCORZ FUMANAL Open the ORCID record for AURELIO LASCORZ FUMANAL [Opens in a new window]
ESTHER RAYA DIEZ
Affiliation:
University of La Rioja, Logrono, Spain
AURELIO LASCORZ FUMANAL
Affiliation:
University of Castilla-La Mancha, Cuenca, Spain
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Abstract

The design and evaluation of social policies requires information systems that enable social intervention with the people targeted by the programmes and services and that also offer indicators for the follow-up and monitoring of the policies adopted. The article presents the process of validation of a tool for diagnosing situations of social difficulty arising from social exclusion. The scale has been implemented in one of Spain’s seventeen Autonomous Communities and has been selected on the basis of Good Practice under the European Social Fund. Expert judges were consulted for content validity; the metric properties of the scores obtained by the scale were examined and an exploratory factorial analysis (EFA) was performed to study the internal structure. The results show that the scale has adequate levels of content validity, construct validity and internal consistency. The SiSo Scale supplies a synthetic index of Social Position, providing professionals with the technical tools needed to carry out social diagnoses and simultaneously giving valid and reliable information on the social condition of people in a situation of social exclusion, which can guide social policy decision-making.

Keywords

social exclusiondiagnosissocial servicesinformation systemevaluationsocial intervention
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Social Policy , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , April 2023 , pp. 376 - 395
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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