Attachments
2. Rationale
2.1 Background
After fourteen years of conflict in Syria, the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in late November of 2024, marked the most significant change in the country’s political landscape in over two decades. Since then, Syria has entered a period of profound political transformation. Nonetheless, the crisis continues to have major impacts on the lives of civilians across the country, where an estimated 16.7 million Syrians are in need of humanitarian assistance including 7.4 million internally displaced persons (IDP)1.
The dynamic, multi-faceted, and protracted nature of the Syrian crisis has created significant challenges for humanitarian information management. Accessibility and security issues within Syria have impeded systematic data collection efforts in the past, limiting the effectiveness of humanitarian planning and implementation inside the country. Following the guidelines of IMPACT for Humanitarian Situation Monitoring, this HSOS has been updated to include indicators that allow a severity needs index’s calculation. Furthermore, the questionnaire has been revisited to increase efficiency in data collection and improve data quality.
- One important objective is to reduce the time of data collection by shortening the questionnaire by 28%. For that, irrelevant questions were removed, such as questions not applicable to a Key Informant (KI) methodology.
- Several questions were added as they covered information gaps highlighted by sectors’ coordinators.
- Questions and options were rephrased to make them shorter and clearer for both enumerators and KIs.
- Questions and options were revisited to make them more relevant to a KI perspective by focusing on the community situation rather than on the households’ practices.
- The revised HSOS tool includes more guidance for enumerators during the data collection. Definitions were added when questions include technical terms such as ‘’IDP’’, ‘’host community’’, ‘’social cohesion’’, ‘‘protection risks’’. A consent note was added, as well as a note at the end for the Complaints and Response Mechanism (CRM). Additionally, the preferred KI profiles were highlighted to encourage enumerators to interview the most appropriate KI type.
- Additional constraints and filters were incorporated into the tool to decrease the time dedicated to follow-ups with the field teams during data cleaning. Soft constraints are messages appearing when an unlikely but possible combination of options are selected to detect potential input errors. Hard constraints and filters are used to make the selection of any illogical or irrational options together impossible.