Enhancing representativeness in highly dynamic settings: Lessons from the NEPIA study

Knowing more about the characteristics, attitudes and behaviour of immigrants in social and political terms is becoming a central concern because of the increasing ethnic and cultural heterogeneity of current European societies. Surveys are key tools to acquire such knowledge. The main aim of the workshop was to review the methodological challenges involved in carrying out surveys of ethnic minorities/immigrant communities. Carrying out surveys specifically devised to cover immigrant populations, or populations with a significant presence of ethnic minorities/immigrant communities, involves unique challenges such as identifying a sample in circumstances in which a sample frame is often not available, reaching a population that is often more mobile than the “autochthonous” population (especially if they are recently arrived immigrants), designing multilingual (and multicultural) questionnaires and recruiting/training personnel to do the field work.Peer Reviewe