New technologies in surveys with refugees |
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| Coordinator 1 | Mr Florian Heinritz (Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories & Universität Hamburg) |
| Coordinator 2 | Dr Gisela Will (Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajcetories) |
With the war in Ukraine, a new crisis came into the public focus in 2022. Similar to the middle of the last decade, when more and more refugees came to Europe, many people had to leave Ukraine and the public’s interest in survey data on refugees increased immensely again. Therefore, the idea is often to collect data on this migrant group as quickly and cheaply as possible.
When it comes to surveys, however, refugees are a special group in many ways: They usually hardly know the language of the host country; they are a frequently moving group; or they have to leave the host country again after some time, to name just a few specific characteristics. This can result in new sources of error in surveys, excluding some subgroups from surveys, or making it more difficult to re-contact them in longitudinal surveys.
To both react to the public demand for fast data and to take these methodological issues into account, the use of innovative technologies in surveys offer new possibilities to survey refugees in an easier way and still keep the Total Survey Error as low as possible. The easier implementation of multilingual surveys in self-administered surveys, using online surveys for better coverage of mobile groups, or apps for better re-contacting refugees over time are just a few example of how we can improve surveys with refugees by using new technologies.
Therefore, our session will discuss the pro and cons of using innovative technologies in surveys with refugees. On the one hand, we will focus on how to reduce the Total Survey Error considering the specific characteristics of refugees. On the other hand, we look at how new technologies can be used for longitudinal surveys, as questions about the integration of refugees often require longitudinal data.