Surveying Across Borders: The Experiences of the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study

Abstract

International migration is often characterised as a process of immigration from economically less developed to highly developed countries. Whereas the factors driving those flows and the integration of the respective ethnic groups are widely analysed, the international mobility of the populations of precisely those affluent societies is regularly missed and less-frequently studied. The chapter describes the research design of the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study as one of the first endeavours to study the internationally mobile populations from prosperous welfare states. Following an origin-based probability sampling of internationally migrating German citizens, it offers survey data to study the consequences of emigration and remigration along the life course. The chapter discusses the quality of this new data infrastructure along the survey lifecycle and compares the distribution of central demographic characteristics in the survey with official reference statistics. The aim is to establish this approach as a new avenue for studying the global lives of internationally mobile populations.

Enhancing Participation in Probability-Based Online Panels: Two Incentive Experiments and Their Effects on Response and Panel Recruitment

“…In contrast, among emigrants, the €20 conditional incentive is associated with higher response and recruitment of younger compared with older migrants and of women compared with men. Although socio-economic information like education and income is unavailable for the sampling data used in this article, research findings suggest that German migrants are positively selected in terms of socio-economic characteristics (Décieux & Mergener, 2021) and that the younger ones are often students (Ette & Witte, 2021), implying lower economic resources. This would explain why high monetary values are particularly effective among the younger age group (see also Becker et al, 2019; Göritz, 2008; Göritz & Luthe, 2013; Schröder et al, 2013).…”

“…This article is concerned with only the last of these four motives while the generally high responsiveness is probably related to the remaining three motives. Second, and related, our sample is peculiar being internationally mobile, younger than the general population, and being positively selected in terms of socio-economic status (Ette & Witte, 2021; Witte et al, 2021). The positive socio-economic selection should reduce the subjective value of incentives, young age may increase it, and spatial mobility should not affect the subjective incentive value.…”

“…A fixed share of migrants was sampled based on simple random sampling within these municipalities. A second cluster sampling procedure was applied to the remaining municipalities of the sample frame, which were sampled randomly and proportional to the volume of international migration following a balanced sampling algorithm (Lohr, 2010;Tillé, 2006; for details, see Ette et al, 2020). All eligible migrants in this second group of municipalities were added to the sample.…”

“…The two related incentive experiments reported in this article were implemented in the recruitment survey of the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study (GERPS). GERPS relies on two probability-based samples of highly mobile populations that were invited per postal mail for participation in the initial wave of a web panel and for subsequent panel participation (Ette et al, 2020). These populations differ not only in their international mobility from the general population but are also on average younger and positively selected in terms of socio-economic status (Feliciano, 2020).…”

International migration and its short‐term effect on partnership stability

“…Only German nationals aged 20–70 years, who either emigrated from or remigrated to Germany between July 2017 and June 2018, were included. Sampled individuals were contacted by postal mail and asked to complete an online survey (push‐to‐web design), resulting in a response rate of 33% for wave 1 (Ette et al, 2020). Subsequent waves were carried out online.…”