Introduction

This chapter presents two surveys conducted in the metropolitan region of Stockholm during 2004 and 2005. The first is an individual survey with a sample of migrants and descendants of migrants from Chile and Turkey together with a ‘control sample’ of native Swedes. The other is a survey of voluntary associations organising different migrant groups from Chile and Turkey. Together, these two surveys form the empirical core of the Swedish research project Ethnic Organisation and Political Integration in the City.

This chapter will pay little attention to the issue of sampling. Thanks to the high accuracy and completeness of Swedish population statistics, the technical aspects of sampling were not exceedingly problematic in our study. Thus, we had the opportunity to concentrate on how to achieve high participation rates and, equally important, high response quality in our two surveys. As we were not performing any kind of methodological experiments as part of our study, we are generally not able to prove that our choices resulted in a better study than would otherwise have been the case. Nevertheless, we hope that our work may serve as a source of inspiration for researchers who are considering similar projects.

This chapter consists of five sections. The first provides a brief description of our research project. The second, and longest section, is devoted to the preparatory phase of the individual survey. Here we consider issues of questionnaire development, translation, interview methods and other practices with bearing on survey participation and response quality. In the third, we look at one aspect of the ‘outcome’ of these preparations, namely nonresponse. In the fourth section, we present the associational survey and compare it to the individual survey with regard to preparations and outcome. In the fifth and final section, we draw conclusions on our experiences from these two surveys and discuss to what extent surveys of migrant populations actually require different methodological steps and measures from other surveys.

The project

Like many European countries, Sweden today can be described as a ‘monocultural’ nation with a few multicultural cities, at least in terms of demography (see Rogers, Tillie & Vertovec 2001; Borevi 2002).