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Many societies nowadays face increasing diversity, which stems among other factors from refugees’ and work migration movements. As many of the current refugee groups are rooted in Arabic countries, the need of an understanding of Arabic minority communities as a result of their increasing amount and influence becomes crucial in many receiving countries. This is not only true on a political and societal, but also on a scientific level. Due to the lack of corresponding experience (in large-scale studies) in social sciences in many Western countries, where people from Arabic cultures just recently arrived, such research entails specific challenges for many researchers. However, there exist quite long traditions of research on people rooted in or descending from Arabic cultures in other disciplines or other countries. This is often linked to different minority groups in these countries and is mainly based on the colonial histories of these countries. We are also very interested in the experiences of, or input from, researchers who have already conducted empirical studies in Arabic regions and who have considered or used (or tried to use) standard instruments or scales that are commonly used in Western (large scale) surveys.

In this session we want to bring together these groups of researchers and we are going to focus on methodological aspects such as: (lack of) respondents’ experience in participation in studies, voluntariness of participation, cultural biased responses and response variation, social desirability, problems with the point of reference of answers (abstract vs. personally linked answering), problems of validity linked to interview’s and respondent’s language, dealing with different Arabic dialects and non-written languages like Kurdish, cultural adequacy of research instruments, validity and reliability of constructs, researching of religion and religiosity, nonverbal communication and code of behaviour, formative influence of researchers on research questions due to the culture (e.g. eurocentrism).

We are interested in presentations of experiences and lessons learned as well as new approaches or emerging methods focusing especially on research on people from Arabic cultures.