Project Details
Projekt
Enhancing Survey Participation within Diverse Respondent Groups: Tailoring a Recruitment Strategy for Turkish Citizens in Germany
Applicants
Dr. Mareike Bünning; Dr. Jannes Jacobsen; Dr. Michael Weinhardt
Subject Area
Empirical Social Research
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 539582703
The integration of the growing number of immigrants and their descendants into German society is a major societal challenge of the coming decades. This results in a pressing need to include these groups in scientific surveys and panel studies for the social and behavioural sciences. Yet, response rates and consent to panel participation are lower in this group compared to the national-born ethnic majority. Thus, innovative data collection procedures are essential to boost survey participation rates and reduce costs when surveying migrants and their descendants. Situated in Research Area 2 of the priority programme, this research project aims to gain insights and provide sound knowledge on how to include immigrant minorities in population surveys and panel studies effectively through survey conceptions and designs that are tailored to their needs. In particular, we use immigrants with Turkish citizenship – one of the most significant minorities in Germany and a group that has proven particularly challenging to reach – as an example to identify and evaluate current practices and develop and test need-tailored communication and motivation strategies for specific target groups, combining qualitative pretests and quantitative field experiments. In particular, the project has three main objectives: (1) Developing target-group-specific fieldwork materials and contact strategies through a range of qualitative pretesting methods; (2) experimentally testing the effectiveness of these newly developed fieldwork materials in a range of survey experiments under fieldwork conditions to show the benefits of such a tailored approach when recruiting respondents from hard-to-reach populations such as Turkish immigrants in Germany based on sound scientific knowledge. In particular, these experiments target three critical junctures during the establishment of a panel study: initial contact, obtaining informed consent for repeated contact, and reaching out for the second wave. Orthogonal to survey materials, we will also vary survey mode to learn more about the performance of the new materials in f2f settings, paper questionnaires and online surveys; and (3) developing best-practice guidelines, materials and examples (open access) to implement such a strategy in new and existing surveys and panel data infrastructures for other researchers in the network of the priority programme and the scientific community overall. These guidelines will also be informed by practical applications of the findings from the qualitative pretests and survey experiments within one of the applicant's survey data infrastructure (German Ageing Survey, DEAS). This application will be a first test of how well the different parts of our to-be-developed "best case scenario" work under the typical conditions and constraints survey managers have to deal with when implementing and administering a general population panel study, which does not explicitly focus on surveying hard-to-reach populations.
DFG Programme
Infrastructure Priority Programmes
