Surveying Ethnic Minorities ― The Impact of Survey Design on Data Quality

The relationship between survey design and the quality of survey data is the central focus of this book. With regard to data quality, the emphasis is on two aspects that seem to be the most relevant in this context: accuracy and comparability. For accuracy, we mainly focus on representativeness, or how well the population under study is represented by the respondents of a survey, as well as measurement, i.e., how the way in which data is collected from respondents might affect the responses they give. The focus in regards to comparability is on the comparability of data collected from different minority groups. The data is drawn from several large-scale surveys conducted among non-Western minorities in The Netherlands. Attention is also paid to the costs of surveys among non-Western minorities.

Joost Kappelhof is a survey methodologist at The Netherlands Institute for Social Research/SCP. His research interests are nonresponse, measurement issues, cross-national or cross-cultural comparability, and hard-to-survey populations.