Tuesday 14th July      Wednesday 15th July      Thursday 16th July      Friday 17th July     

Tuesday 14th July, 11:00 - 12:30 Room: L-103

Surveying immigrants and minorities from a comparative cross-country perspective 1
Convenor	Professor Hans-jürgen Andreß (Universität zu Köln )
Coordinator 1	Dr Rossalina Latcheva (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights)
Coordinator 2	Ms Ursula Till-tentschert (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights)

Session Details

Despite the ongoing demand for data on immigrants and ethnic minorities and the increasing availability of immigrant statistics, a considerable lack of comparable data on immigrants and ethnic minorities still persists. The reasons for this are manifold, e.g. diverging definitions of the target groups (by ethnicity, country of birth and country of birth of parents, nationality, and citizenship) and difficulties to properly cover the target population with traditional data collection methods.

One of the main challenges faced by survey researchers are incomplete or the lack of sampling frames. A cross-country and/or cross-cultural survey design introduces additional complexity in surveying immigrants and ethnic minorities. The heterogeneity in regard to applied methodologies (sampling, data collection modes, questionnaire design, translation and weighting) as well as with regard to legal status, language proficiency, and cultural norms of the target populations has an effect on the coherence of results between different groups of origin and between national contexts. Moreover, standard questionnaire classifications, such as ISCED for educational attainment, cannot easily be applied to immigrants and therefore calls for new concepts to be developed and applied.
This session welcomes contributions that focus on these challenges and that offer solutions for some of the difficulties discussed. It welcomes theoretical contributions as well as survey applications in a cross-country or cross-cultural setting, with a special focus on immigrants, their descendants and ethnic minorities. We particularly encourage submissions which apply a comparative perspective to the following dimensions in survey research:
• Identification and definition of target groups
• Availability and accessibility of different sampling frames and their impact
• Application of different sampling strategies within one survey
• Approaches to reaching target populations
• Differences in field work organisation, training of interviewers
• Modes of interviewing and survey design
• Questionnaire design and translation
• Application of standard classifications
• Weighting

Paper Details

1. Mexicans in America
Dr Gabriela Farfan (World Bank)
Dr Maria Eugenia Genoni (World Bank)
Dr Duncan Thomas (Duke University)

Undocumented migrants are hard to enumerate. Data from the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS) are used to measure the extent and selectivity of migrants not enumerated in U.S. based surveys. MxFLS is an on-going longitudinal population-representative survey of Mexicans living in Mexico in 2002, that follows and interviews movers from Mexico to the U.S. MxFLS migrants are compared with Mexican-origin migrants interviewed in the American Community Survey and Current Population Survey. We estimate that these surveys miss a significant number of recent migrants, and undercount younger, single, male and less educated migrants.

2. Sampling minorities in New Zealand using a combination of imperfect strategies
Dr Robert Clark (University of Wollongong)

Subpopulations, including Maori, Pacific and Asian populations, are a particular focus of the New Zealand Health Survey. No national list frame is available, and a combination of imperfect strategies has been used to target these minorities. These include oversampling by region, a dual frame design making use of the Electoral Roll, and the use of proxy reporting of ethnicities to target selection within households. All approaches are subject to error, and a novel design has been implemented to blend these strategies while reflecting their error. This design is summarised and its performance over its first three years is evaluated

3. Surveying the immigrant: challenges and issues of comparability in a survey on EU migrants in four European cities
Dr Maurizio Curtarelli (Ecorys UK)
Miss Anja Meierkord (Ecorys UK)

A survey carried out by Ecorys in 2014-2015 in four European non-capital cities (Milan, Frankfurt, Leeds and Rotterdam) on EU workers migrants, aimed at investigating the social and economic inclusion of migrants from EU28 countries and their impact on local services, has revealed a number of issues related to the design and methodology adopted, which eventually resulted in a non-comparability and diversity of results.