Translating Qualitative Insights into Survey Recruitment Design

Recruiting hard-to-reach populations in survey research remains one of the most persistent methodological challenges in the social sciences. Migrant groups, in particular, tend to exhibit lower response rates and higher attrition in general population surveys, jeopardising representativeness and limiting our ability to capture diverse social realities. This paper presents qualitative results from a mixed-methods study addressing these challenges among people of Turkish origin, the largest immigrant group in Germany. The current study is part of a wider project that combines qualitative and quantitative approaches to develop and test recruitment strategies targeting Turkish migrants in Germany, employing a sequential mixed-methods design. During the first phase, qualitative interviews with community experts, as well as focus groups and cognitive interviews with members of the target population, explored reasons for survey participation and nonresponse and guided the creation of targeted invitation materials. Key themes emerging from the interview data were the importance of trust, sense of belonging, and the role of language and its symbolic significance. By integrating qualitative insights into quantitative testing, the project demonstrates how mixed-methods research can generate empirically grounded strategies to improve survey participation among hard-to-reach migrant populations and strengthen the inclusiveness of survey data collection. In doing so, the study contributes to ongoing methodological debates about how best to include immigrant populations in large-scale social surveys. It illustrates not only how qualitative research can inform fieldwork design within a mixed-methods framework, but also how such an approach may contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms behind survey nonresponse.