Setting Up an Offline Recruited Online Access Panel with an Oversampling of Immigrants and their Descendants: The German DeZIM.panel

In recent years, most Western European societies have become increasingly diverse due to on-going immigration and naturalisation processes. Even though politics and society now acknowledge mostly the reality of post-migrant states in which immigration is an inevitable feature (Foroutan, 2021), data collection infrastructures have still to catch up. Multi-wave access panels that allow to analyse current trends in society while allowing for specific subgroup analyses are still scarce.

The DeZIM.panel has been set up as such a data collection infrastructure that explicitly takes today's post-migrant society into account. It started in 2022, building on a large-scale offline recruited first wave in 2021 with more than 9,000 participants, oversampling specific immigrant-origin groups: people from Turkey, other majority Muslim countries, states with guestworker agreements as well as resettlers from Eastern Europe.

The DeZIM.panel is a multi-thematic survey that includes topics relevant to sociology, political science, psychology, educational sciences, economy and other disciplines. It runs four regular waves per year, with additional flash surveys after current events such as the war in Ukraine. The DeZIM.panel was initiated by the German Center for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM), which is funded by the German Federal Ministry.