Quantitative Methods in the
Social Sciences 2

Summer School on immigration and population dynamics

Surveying immigrants and minorities

The summer school "Surveying immigrants and minorities" is dedicated to the specificities of survey taking with immigrants and minorities. Not only are immigrants and ethnic/national minorities rare populations, but they are not always identified in censuses or population registers. Investigators have therefore to develop imaginative sampling strategies to build representative samples of these populations. Moreover, reaching immigrants and minorities may engage more difficulties than for the mainstream population. Issues in language, location of residence, more or less illegal status, etc. have to be dealt with. Non response rates and weighting procedures may also be affected by the characteristics of the targeted population. Beyond the technical dimension of survey taking, the summer school will address the problematic related to immigrant and minorities surveys, their design and implementation. The summer school provided a presentation of some of the major national and cross-national surveys by their principal investigators. Lab sessions were dedicated to the analysis of the files of two of these surveys (ReO and Mafe) and students gave short papers with an analysis of one of the datasets on a selected topic.

Programme

Topics covered:

Main challenges about making surveys on immigrants and minorities:

• Defining populations (nationality, ethnicity and race in surveys)
• Data protection
• Sampling rare populations
• Collecting data on integration and discrimination
• Cross-country comparison

Methodology of survey taking (sampling, quality checking and weighting)

Case studies: Major surveys (national or cross-countries) in Europe

Sensitive issues: Asking questions about contraception, abortion, forced marriage and violence

Comples issues: collecting data on discrimination and religion