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Equity & Inclusion

Measuring Social Inclusion: What the Data Shows, What It Misses, and What We Did About It

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12 May, 2026

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Written by Timothy Cheng, Senior Consultant and Strategic Lead for DEI Services

This is the second of a series of two blog posts about the reflection from the Resolve Community Scorecard project.

During the course of this project, one of Hong Kong’s most consistent sources of corporate inclusion data quietly ceased to exist. Community Business, which had produced annual data on workplace inclusion of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and other (LGBTQ+) communities for years, announced in early 2026 that it was winding down operations and has since closed. Its research publications remain available for download, but the survey will not continue.

I do not raise this to dwell on the loss. I raise it because it illustrates something important about how social inclusion data works in Hong Kong, and in many cities: it is more fragile than it looks. Instruments that take years to develop and validate can disappear when the single organisation sustaining them can no longer continue. And when they disappear, there is usually no mechanism to absorb what they produced.

That fragility was one of the starting points for the project I led this year with Resolve Foundation, supported by ReThink Foundation. The question we set out to answer was: how do you build a measurement framework for social inclusion in Hong Kong that is both credible and sustainable?

What makes this question harder than it sounds is what Resolve is actually trying to measure. Most organisations working on social inclusion measure their outputs: the number of people trained, programmes delivered, or events held. Some measure short-term outcomes: shifts in knowledge, attitude, or behaviour among the people they work with directly. Fewer still try to measure long-term societal outcomes, such as whether the broader society is actually becoming more inclusive. That is Resolve’s ambition, and it sits in the Theory of Change that underpins all of their work.

This is not a trivial ask. Any honest practitioner in monitoring, evaluation, and learning will tell you that organisations can contribute to long-term change but rarely attribute it to themselves. The forces shaping social inclusion in a city are too numerous, too interconnected, and too slow-moving for any single actor to claim credit. Resolve is not trying to attribute. What they are trying to do is hold themselves accountable to a vision that goes beyond what they can directly control, which is to ask, periodically and honestly, whether Hong Kong is moving in the right direction. That is ambitious, and it requires a different kind of measurement than most frameworks are designed to provide. This post shares what we found when we tried to build one.

Two approaches, two sets of trade-offs

Internationally, social inclusion measurement tends to follow one of two approaches, or a combination of both.

The first draws on administrative and census data to construct objective indicators.

Statistics Canada’s Social Inclusion Framework for Ethnocultural Groups (2025) covers 11 themes and over 120 indicators, from labour market participation and civic engagement through to discrimination and victimisation, made accessible through a public data visualisation tool. The EU Social Scoreboard tracks social progress across member states using headline indicators. The Inclusive City Barometer scores cities against each other across up to 110 metrics. These tools offer breadth, consistency, and the ability to track change over time. Their limitation is that they measure conditions but not experience: whether people feel they belong, whether they feel safe, whether they can be fully themselves in the spaces they inhabit.

The second approach asks people directly.

Australia’s Social Exclusion Monitor covers seven domains from material resources through to personal safety. Canada’s Alberta Urban Municipalities Association (AUMA) Measuring Inclusion Tool asks respondents to score community situations against five levels of inclusion. The Social Community Opportunities Profile (SCOPE, Huxley et al., 2012) rates participants’ experiences across domains, including leisure, housing, safety, work, and community inclusion and has been adapted for the Hong Kong context by Chan et al. (2016) in a study of 168 mental health service users surveyed in Chinese. Survey instruments get closer to lived experience. They are, however, resource-intensive to design, field, and sustain, and many SCOPE-based studies, in Hong Kong and elsewhere, have been one-off exercises rather than ongoing programmes.

Some frameworks attempt to combine both. The UK Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) Measurement Framework for Equality and Human Rights draws on legislative sources, administrative data, and qualitative evidence from NGOs, academics, and media, across six domains and 50 statistical measures, with explicit attention to intersectionality. Non-governmental scorecards such as Equileap’s Gender Equality Scorecard and the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index translate complex policies into comparable scores, creating accountability in the absence of official data.

Neither approach is sufficient on its own. Census data tells you what is happening to groups; it rarely tells you what those groups experience. Surveys capture experience but are difficult to sustain. This tension sits at the heart of inclusion measurement, and it shaped every decision we made in designing Resolve’s framework.

What Hong Kong already has

More data exists in Hong Kong than many people realise. What is missing is the connective tissue between them.

The Hong Kong Council of Social Service (HKCSS) Hong Kong Inclusion and Diversity (HKiD) Index is the most comprehensive cross-domain instrument currently available. It measures inclusion of ethnic minorities across seven life domains using objective ratios, triangulated with primary surveys. It is methodologically credible and has produced useful baseline data, but it covers one identity group.

The Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) conducts a periodic Equal Opportunities Awareness Survey, most recently in 2021, with previous editions in 1998, 2003, 2007, 2012, and 2015, covering public attitudes and perceptions on discrimination across sex, disability, family status, and race. It uses a standardised anti-discrimination attitude index on a 0 to 100 scale. The intervals between surveys have been uneven, which limits longitudinal analysis.

Academic researchers have developed tailored tools. Lee et al. (2024) designed the Support for Social Inclusion Score (SFSIS), assessing public support for inclusion policies across five marginalised groups using 100 policy items on a 7-point scale. Chan et al. (2016) developed the Social and Communities Opportunities Profile in Chinese (SCOPE-C), adapting the SCOPE instrument for mental health service users across eight inclusion domains.

The CareER Disability Inclusion Employer Index assesses workplace disability inclusion at the organisational level. Many of these sector-focused tools measure what organisations do but they were not designed to assess how people experience inclusion at the societal level.

Four gaps that a framework needs to address

Our desk research identified four gaps that consistently recur across Hong Kong’s existing data landscape.

The Data Gap is the most fundamental. Government data addresses discrete categories, such as ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, but does not capture the compounding disadvantages faced by people who hold multiple marginalised identities. Key communities, particularly gender and sexual minorities and religious minorities, remain largely absent from major government datasets, making it impossible to track their inclusion outcomes systematically.

The Interpretation Gap concerns the ambiguity of indicators. An increase in discrimination complaints filed with the EOC could mean rising intolerance, or it could mean greater public awareness of rights and higher confidence in reporting. A purely quantitative reading cannot resolve this. Qualitative assessment alongside the numbers is structurally necessary for accurate interpretation.

The Accessibility Gap relates to data that exists but is not fully available. Methodologies for several key indices are publicly available, but full datasets and detailed reports frequently require organisational participation or purchase. This limits the sector’s ability to build a comprehensive, cumulative picture across sources.

The Framework Gap is the absence of a centralised, longitudinal tool. While organisations across Hong Kong produce valuable data, their efforts remain fragmented and often infrequent. The city currently lacks a framework that synthesises available evidence across communities and domains into a coherent, repeatable narrative of inclusion over time.

What we built, and why

These gaps shaped the approach we developed with Resolve. The challenge was to design something credible enough to be taken seriously, and practical enough for a small non-governmental organisation (NGO) to sustain.

A territory-wide survey was not realistic. Beyond the resource implications (namely that designing, fielding, and analysing a survey rigorously is expensive), there is a more fundamental methodological issue. A representative survey tells you what the average person thinks. In doing so, it risks averaging out the experiences of those most affected by exclusion: precisely the people whose perspectives matter most for an honest assessment of inclusion. As the disability rights movement has long insisted, nothing about us without us.

The Resolve Community Scorecard draws instead on the Community Score Card (CSC) process, developed by CARE Malawi in 2002 and adopted across health, education, and governance sectors internationally. Its orientation is participatory, non-adversarial, and focused on structured dialogue rather than external judgment.

A community panel of people with professional and lived experience of inclusion reviews a curated evidence pack and scores Hong Kong’s progress against a five-level rubric across four domains drawn from Resolve’s Theory of Change: all people are free from discrimination; equitable outcomes enjoyed by all groups; diverse representation in public life; and pride in inclusion as a core value in society. Panellists score independently, deliberate together, and re-score. The variance between panellists is treated as data, not noise. The goal is not consensus but shared understanding.

This is not a perfect solution to Hong Kong’s measurement gaps, and we would not claim otherwise. It is a principled response to them, designed within the real constraints of what a civil society organisation can sustain. What it adds to the existing landscape is something currently absent: a cross-domain, intersectional, community-led assessment that asks not just what is happening to groups, but what they experience. And crucially, it gives Resolve a mechanism to hold themselves accountable to a long-term vision, not by claiming to have caused change, but by committing to look honestly at whether change is happening.

Resolve plans to pilot the scorecard in mid-2027. The full methodology is documented in the report Closing the Data Gap: Developing a Framework for Measuring Inclusion in Hong Kong. https://resolvehk.org/about-resolve/reports-and-resources/

Hong Kong does not lack people doing serious work on inclusion measurement. What it lacks is a shared infrastructure that connects those efforts, sustains them over time, and keeps the voices of marginalised communities at the centre. That infrastructure will not be built by any single organisation, but it has to start somewhere.

If you are working on inclusion measurement and would like to exchange findings or explore what a similar framework might look like for your context, we would be glad to talk.

References