Documentation standards in anti-discrimination counselling

Anti-discrimination counseling supports affected individuals both in their well-being and in asserting their rights. Successful cases can also encourage others to stand up against discrimination and create preventive effects for perpetrators. At the same time, counseling serves as an important tool for monitoring discrimination in society.

Documentation of cases serves multiple purposes: it supports case management, enables reflection and organization of information, provides insights into effective strategies, and can make trends in discrimination visible to the public. Different purposes require different types of data—from personalized information for case handling to fully anonymized data for statistics.

The DeZIM Institute was commissioned by the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency to develop minimum standards for documenting anti-discrimination counseling. These standards aim to support various counseling centers, create shared data foundations, and facilitate the exchange of strategies as well as statistical analyses. They are designed to be flexible for different documentation systems, including institutions that do not yet have their own system.

The concept of minimum standards creates the possibility for data from various existing anti-discrimination counseling documentation systems to be consolidated and analyzed on a common basis. In this way, a comprehensive joint evaluation of data from different anti-discrimination counseling services can be achieved.

Development of a Concept for the Content-Related and Methodological Minimum Standards of Documentation Procedures in Anti-Discrimination Counseling

To account for the diversity of anti-discrimination counseling centers in terms of counseling focus and resources during the development of minimum standards, over 50 anti-discrimination counseling centers across Germany were contacted and asked how they document their cases.
To discuss the results of the comparative research, a selection of the counseling centers that had already been surveyed about their documentation practices were invited to participate in a total of three expert workshops in summer and autumn 2021 to further discuss the minimum standards. In the first of the three workshops, in addition to the results of the comparative research, some fundamental questions regarding documentation were discussed. The discussion also addressed the objectives of documenting anti-discrimination counseling and potential evaluation criteria for selecting the categories to be included in the minimum standards.

In the second workshop, the focus was on discussing the first draft list of categories developed based on these criteria as a proposal for the minimum standards. This draft was tested in the third workshop using example cases, and further adjustments were made. Additionally, remaining open questions and, in particular, the challenges of documentation in practice were discussed.
For the development of the minimum standards and the decision-making regarding which categories to include, the expert workshops agreed on three evaluation criteria: anonymization, analytical value, and usability. These criteria were to be applied to all categories and subcategories.

The review of existing documentation systems showed that many anti-discrimination counseling centers already document their cases, either using their own systems or existing systems such as that of the German Anti-Discrimination Association.

The minimum standards are not intended to replace existing systems, but to provide a common framework for consolidating and analyzing data from different systems. For organizations without systematic documentation, the minimum standards offer guidance on using a compatible system to enable long-term joint analyses.
Central thematic areas were defined for the minimum standards, forming the basic structure of the documentation.

Case description

Discrimination characteristic

Life domain

Form of discrimination

Perpetrators and mechanisms causing discrimination

Counseling process

Sociodemographic data

The thematic areas are further divided into two to three sublevels. This structure allows for varying levels of detail in implementing the minimum standards and takes different needs and resources into account. Recording each thematic area represents the minimum requirement for systematic case documentation

Based on practical challenges and discussions in the expert workshops, three key recommendations can be derived:

1. The minimum standards should be understood as a learning system, regularly reviewed and updated both through exchange within and between counseling centers and through external evaluation.
2. The practical challenges also make it clear that counseling centers need sufficient resources to implement, coordinate, and analyze the documentation.
3. The potential of the collected counseling data should be utilized, and the data should be analyzed accordingly.

• https://www.antidiskriminierungsstelle.de/SharedDocs/downloads/DE/publikationen/Expertisen/mindeststandards_antidiskriminierungsberatung.html