Introduction

This chapter is aimed at those migration researchers who live in an imperfect world, methodologically speaking. Specifically, it addresses a series of challenges that arise when no sufficiently comprehensive sample frame is available, thus making the use of standard probability sampling either outright impossible, or else unacceptable in terms of the share and characteristics of the target population covered by that procedure.

Such was the situation with the NEPIA survey, the fieldwork of which was conducted in the spring of 2003 in the Southern Spanish region of Andalusia. Located at the south-western edge of Europe, just across the Strait of Gibraltar from the African continent, Andalusia is home to about eight million people. Its vast shoreline attracts millions of foreign tourists each year. Starting in the 1980s, an increasing number of people from Northern and Central Europe came to settle more or less permanently in Andalusia, while the second half of the 1990s marked the onset of sizeable immigration flows from economically less developed countries.

Aiming to gain solid empirical knowledge on the social situation of these latter migrants, the NEPIA study was commissioned in June 2002. The study was well-funded, with most of the project's budget of close to half a million euros provided by the European Social Fund (ESF); indeed, the initiative for conducting large-scale social research on the living conditions of migrant workers in Andalusia had originated in Brussels, probably due to concerns sparked by the violent El Ejido incidents of February 2000, which had made international headlines. However, the ESF's generous funding came with a tight and non-negotiable deadline (31 December 2003) for the whole project to be completed. Apart from the survey on which this chapter focuses (see Pérez Yruela & Rinken 2005 for the broader picture), the NEPIA study comprised a series of additional tasks. Thus, from recruitment of a core research team of ten full-time staff to the onset of data collection, just five months (October 2002 through February 2003) were available for preparing the survey. Hence, the project's success hinged not just on finding workable solutions to the various challenges that will be discussed in the next section, but also on those solutions’ smooth applicability.