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Displaced persons in Germany: their assistance needs and take-up of counselling services ,
Displaced persons face a great variety of challenges in various areas of life after their arrival in Germany. Potential challenges and problems with which refugees are faced after their arrival include language acquisition, acquiring educational qualifications and looking for a job, but also highly existential issues such as medical care, their financial situation, and securing their residence status. Against this background, Brief analysis 05/2018 examines what assistance needs existed among refugees at the time of the survey in the second half of 2016, and what contribution was made by counselling services towards satisfying them.
Brief analysis 05|2018 is based on data from the "IAB-BAMF-SOEP Refugee Survey 2016", in which roughly 4,500 refugees were interviewed in the second half of 2016 who had entered Germany between 2013 and 2016 and filed an asylum application.
The key results of the Brief analysis include:
- The respondent refugees stated at the time of the survey that they had had the greatest need for help since they arrived in Germany when it came to learning German, their financial situation, medical care and looking for somewhere to stay.
- Initial basic assistance needs, such as financial and medical care, were already covered in the case of around 90 percent of the respondent refugees at the time of the survey, whilst considerable need for assistance persisted amongst some of them when it came to topics related to a more medium- or longer-term perspective in Germany, such as education, work and language acquisition.
- There was potential to increase the awareness of asylum and migration counselling services at the time of the survey – fewer than one in three knew of the existence of one of the services or had already taken one of them up.
- There were significant positive connections with regard to almost all areas between the take-up of counselling services and receiving assistance where it was needed. In particular, this positive connection relates to those areas in which assistance requirements had been least met so far (including refugee and asylum-related issues, looking for a job, recognition of qualifications, and education).
- In addition, other individual characteristics of the respondent refugees exerted a positive impact on their receiving assistance on refugee and asylum-related issues. For example, those refugees who had been in Germany for some time and had arrived at a better self-assessment of their German language skills were more likely to state that they had received assistance in refugee and asylum-related matters.
- Against this background, it seems important to further increase the awareness and availability of asylum and migration counselling services in order to enable the counselling service to successfully provide support to an even larger group of individuals through increased demand.
The authors of the Brief analysis: Jana A. Scheible and Axel Böhm
The Brief analysis is only available in German.