CIMM - "Magic Mix" Project

Work done!

We had our final meeting with our mentor and our clients where we exposed our work and findings and delivered our report. This was a truly unique experience and, from the CIMM team, we want to thank PREMIUM and our clients: the Commissie Integratie en Mondialisering Maastricht, for their support and understanding.

Hello everyone! 

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated limits imposed on daily life, we found it necessary to change our research strategy and approach to the PREMIUM project posed to us by CIMM. This document outlines what we believe to be a viable and practical alteration to the plans we had prior.

Our initial approach

From the beginning, we had planned to elicit valuable information from stakeholders, including potential beneficiaries, local government officials, housing marketeers and others, using Q-method in guided interviews. Together with macro-level data from statistics and best practices from elsewhere, they would have made up the cornerstone of our empirical effort.

These interviews would have consisted of two components. The first component would have been a short but in-depth survey of the participants background, their socioeconomic standing, their relation to the topic of social housing and magic mix policies, their political orientation, gender, Nationality, etc.

The second and more important component was to provide the participants with a Q-grid, an analytical interactive tool for performing the Q-method, and to have them perform a task; The task required was to sort statements about the Magic Mix policy and related topics on a grid from -10 to 10, allowing for less sorted statements on the tails of this distribution. The grid we had in mind was not fully prepped yet, but it would perhaps have run along the participants agreement with given statement. The added value of this type of method over e.g. Likert type questions is that even in a small sample, it aims to provide an average distribution of discourse points, rather than only individual valuations. In other words, the strength of scale associated with the statements is quantifiably comparable across participants, controlling even for idiosyncratic differences among them.

One characteristic of this approach is that it is quite time-intensive, requires supervision on part of the researcher, and does not offer itself to remote interview settings in any form known to us at the moment. It is therefore that this part of the initial design has become infeasible for us in the current situation.

Our new approach

Settling into our new remote reality, we now have discussed our different options and decided that we would like to pursue the following. The statistical background will stay as it is, using data from the municipality and from CBS to account for macro trends in the Netherlands and allow for a more informed comparison of the Maastricht housing market with elsewhere, where magic mix projects already exist. The best-practice component devoted to existing projects elsewhere will be extended, whenever comparable, to projects outside the Netherlands and we put a lot more emphasis on finding as much precedent as possible in order for us to be able to discern trends from it.

Lastly, our empirical component could be made up of a limited amount of phone interviews and a very brief online survey. We decided to cancel the Q-method out of our approach and rather do the following: We plan to conduct 5-10 stakeholder interviews with people from the supply side of the housing market (e.g. housing corporations and the municipality officials involved), which will inform the supplier’s viewpoint in our analysis.

Next to that, we would like to launch a very brief survey (4-5 minutes) intended as a platform for potential beneficiaries to (a) voice their requests and needs in the housing system envisioned, and to (b) answer a few questions regarding their problems they encounter, policy aspects they are not willing to tolerate, and some background related questions. We seek ethical approval for these types of questions with both the client and the central PREMIUM management team.

Here is our Midterm presentation! We hope you like it and we look forward to receiving your feedback soon.