Beyond onomastics - New methods for reaching small, hard-to-reach and/or hidden groups

Data-Method-Monitoring Cluster

Project head: Prof. Dr. Sabrina J. Mayer

Project team members: Dr. Laura Scholaske

Research with specific groups that are numerically represented only to a small extent in the population is one of the central challenges in integration and migration research.

In this research project, we focus on the aspects of sampling and access to groups or their accessibility. Meanwhile, a multi-stage survey process with the use of pre-classification procedures based on personal names has become a common standard in integration and migration research. However, this procedure cannot be applied equally well to all groups. Therefore, this project will test the suitability of other procedures and discuss and classify the resulting biases for different groups such as persons from Portugal and Germans without a migration background who have converted to Islam.

Research questions:

Different sampling methods and the resulting possibilities of field access are of great importance for the survey process at DeZIM. For reasons of feasibility, it is not always possible to conduct a personal survey on the basis of residents' registration office addresses with pre-classification, since, on the one hand, considerable financial resources are necessary, but also certain groups can only (still) be poorly captured with the usual onomastic ("name-scanning") procedures. Therefore, this project focuses on the questions of what possibilities there are beyond onomastic procedures to reach small, hard-to-reach and/or hidden groups and to what extent these procedures are distorted when they are compared with the microcensus. Two groups are selected, one that is covered by the microcensus and allows for a comparison of the biases (persons from Portugal) and one group for which this is not the case and for which information is collected for the first time (Germans who converted to Islam). For the group of persons from Portugal, results from the inaugural wave of the online access panel, which will take place at the beginning of 2021, will also be used in order to be able to assess the biases of the procedures.

Funding: Federal Ministry for Education, Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (Institutional funding)

Cooperation partner:

We cooperate with a number of partners. Internationally/nationally, similar procedures for the group of people of Asian descent in Germany are being examined together with Christoph Nguyen in the thematic field of anti-Asian racism. A joint project with researchers from InZentIM (Achim Goerres, Jonas Elis) is planned with actors from the research community, in which ethnic German immigrants and their descendants will be interviewed.