Total Survey Error in Practice

11Survey Research and the Quality of Survey Data Among Ethnic Minorities

Joost Kappelhof

Department of Education, Minorities, and Methodology, Institute for Social Research/SCP, The Hague, The Netherlands

11.1 Introduction

There are important reasons for collecting survey data from and about ethnic minorities. Many national governments are, for instance, interested in the degree of sociocultural integration of ethnic minorities as well as in developments regarding their socioeconomic position (Bijl and Verweij, 2012; Font and Mendez, 2013; Thomas, 2008). In turn, the healthcare sector poses important questions about possible differences in lifetime risks of mood, anxiety, and substance‐use disorders (Breslau et al., 2005), addiction‐related behaviors (Caetano et al., 1998), or use of facilities (Herníndez‐Quevedo and Jiminez‐Rubio, 2009). When data are missing in registers for the countries of origin, research among recent migrants can also provide estimates of the rates of incidence of certain diseases (Chaturvedi and McKeigue, 1994). For these reasons, survey research remains an important method of obtaining information about ethnic minorities.

Setting up and conducting survey research is not easy due to problems such as low response rates, measurement errors, and coverage errors. In survey research among ethnic minorities, these problems are often amplified (see, e.g., Deding et al., 2008; Feskens et al., 2007; Font and Mendez, 2013; Kappelhof, 2014a). For example, Font ...