Salentin and Schmeets Comparative Migration Studies (2017) 5:21 DOI 10.1186/s40878-017-0062-2 ORIGINALARTICLE Open Access Sampling immigrants in the Netherlands and Germany Kurt Salentin1* and Hans Schmeets2 * Correspondence:
[email protected] Abstract 1Bielefeld University, Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on This paper discusses the limitations of harmonised sampling designs for survey Conflict and Violence, research on immigrants in Germany and the Netherlands. Although the concepts for Universitätsstraße 25, 33615 immigrants are largely similar in both countries, there are severe constraints when it Bielefeld, Germany The manuscript belongs to the comes to comparable sampling designs. While in the Netherlands a sample can be special issue titled “Sampling drawn from a national population register by Statistics Netherlands, this is impossible Migrants in Europe: How to develop in Germany due to the decentralised setup of the population register and legal a comparative design?” guest edited by Hans-Jürgen Andreß and restrictions on merging existing databases. Harmonisation of immigrant statistics is Romana Careja. thus less a problem at the concept level than in the implementation. Achieving a Full list of author information is harmonised data collection on immigrants for Germany and the Netherlands will be available at the end of the article a major challenge. Keywords: Sampling, Comparative research, Immigrants, The Netherlands, Germany, Population register, Harmonisation Introduction The aim of this article is to provide researchers interested in comparative migra- tion and minority studies an introduction to the potential and the limitations of sampling migrant and minority populations in the Netherlands and Germany. Harmonized data-collection is crucial for a comparison of survey results across countries (Huddleston, Niessen, & Tjaden, 2013).