Werte Kolleginnen und Kollegen,

wir möchten Sie nochmals auf die Session „Studying immigrants using the ESS: Methodological challenges, empirical consequences” auf der ESS Conference 2024 in Lissabon aufmerksam machen, die Antje Röder und ich gemeinsam organisieren. Reichen Sie Ihr Vortragsangebot bis zum 31. Januar 2024 ein.  Wir freuen uns darauf!

Beste Grüße

Stephanie Müssig und Antje Röder

Studying immigrants using the ESS: Methodological challenges, empirical consequences,  ESS Conference 2024 in Lisbon

Since its release, scholars from various disciplines all around the world use the ESS as source for research on persons with immigrant background. An important reason for its popularity among immigrant researchers is its bi-annual repetition and the regular participation of many Western European countries that both allow to combine data of several rounds and/or countries, resulting in a decent number of respondents with immigrant background. This circumvents the problem of small numbers that researchers usually face when using population survey data for studying immigrants. Moreover, its broad range of questions on (political) attitudes and behaviour is extra-ordinary for a multi-themed population survey, making the ESS often the only data source for studying these topics on immigrants or groups that mainly are of immigrant background, such as Muslims.

At the same time, there are reasons for reservations regarding its authoritative use on immigrants. Although the ESS displays a strong awareness for the need of research on immigrants by including items that enable their identification among respondents, it is not an immigrant survey. There is no specific sampling strategy for immigrant groups, and the questionnaire is only presented in a limited set of languages– a major obstacle for the participation of new immigrants or of immigrants with little knowledge of these languages. For this reason, non-response among immigrants is probably higher than among other population groups and not at random, which is considered a severe challenge to obtain unbiased results.

Although these and other sources for potential biases are well known among scholars, they have been neither systematically investigated nor frequently addressed in publications using the ESS. Among the open questions are: how biased is immigrant data really, and to what extent are substantial results affected by this? How can we take this into account in our analyses and when interpreting the results?

We encourage contributions with methodological focus (with or without comparative approach) that, e.g.,

• take stock of the descriptive representation of immigrants in the ESS
• assess whether bias in descriptive representation leads to bias in the substantive results on attitudes and behaviour
• appraise how the transition to a self-completion survey aggravates or alleviates existing caveats regarding research of immigrants with the ESS, and how to solve potential problems and pitfalls
• address other methodological issues regarding research on immigrants with the ESS
• use ESS data to study immigrants in an innovative way to overcome methodological challenges.

We invite abstract submissions via the ESS management platform ConfTool (max. 500 words). For submissions, please click here.

The deadline for submissions is 31 January 2024.

For more information about the conference and its sessions, please click here: 5^th International European Social Survey (ESS) Conference

For questions regarding the session “Studying immigrants using the ESS”, please contact the session convenors Stephanie Müssig and Antje Röder.

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Dr. Stephanie Müssig

Stv. Geschäftsführerin – FAU EZIRE

Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg

FAU Forschungszentrum Islam und Recht in Europa FAU EZIRE

Bohlenplatz 6 | 91054 Erlangen | Tel: +49 9131 85-26830 | Fax: +49 9131 85-26399

FAU Forschungszentrum FAU EZIRE | www.ezire.fau.de/person/stephanie-muessig/