Abstract

The Syrian crisis has caused one of the largest episodes of forced displacement since World War II and some of the densest refugee-hosting situations in modern history. Syria's immediate neighbors host the bulk of Syrian refugees. The host countries were dealing with impact of inflow of refugees as well as consequences of the Syrian conflict such as disruption on trade and economic activity and growth and spread of the Islamic State. This survey was designed to generate comparable findings on the lives and livelihoods of Syrian refugees and host communities in Jordan, Lebanon and Kurdistan, Iraq.

The goals of the survey originally were: - to assess the socio-economic and living conditions of a representative sample of the Syrian refugee and host community population. - to understand the implications in terms of social and economic conditions on the host communities. - to identify strategies to support Syrian refugees and host communities in the immediate and longer term.

Geographic coverage

Syrian refugee and host community in Kurdistan, Iraq

Analysis unit

Refugee household and individual

Kind of data

Sample survey data [ssd]

Sampling procedure

Conducting a representative survey in Lebanon was especially challenging. The first difficulty was that, as of 2015, there was no recent or reliable sample frame, even for Lebanese households, as the last official population census was conducted in 1932. Typically, such a sample frame consists of the universe of enumeration areas in a country, with associated estimates of population. This meant that we had to construct our own sample frame by selecting a few Small Area Units (SAUs) and then conducting a full listing operation by visiting every household within the selected SAUs and collecting basic demographic and contact information. The second difficulty was that there was no available cartographic division of the country into geographic areas small enough to be the subject of a full listing operation, which could then serve as a sampling frame for the SAUs. Circonscription Foncières (CF) were the finest level of disaggregation available; CFs are generally too large to be listed as some have populations of over 100,000. Finally, there was no available sampling frame for Syrian refugees in Lebanon, which meant that we had to depend on UNHCR data on registered Syrian refugees, combined with the estimates of Lebanese population at the CF level. Given these challenges and time and budgetary constraints, the sample was selected in multiple (four) stages.

Note: A more detailed description of the sample design is presented in Section 2 of "Survey Design and Sampling: A methodology note for the 2015-16 surveys of Syrian refugees and host communities in Jordan, Lebanon and Kurdistan, Iraq" document.

Mode of data collection

Face-to-face [f2f]