Sampling Refugees for an Educational Longitudinal Survey

Abstract

In the years 2015 and 2016, in Germany more than half a million refugees were granted asylum or they were accepted being eligible for subsidiary protection. Thus, they got a residence permit. About 29% of the accepted refugees were younger than 18 years. To study education related integration issues in this group, in 2016 the large-scale survey study “Refugees in the German Educational System (ReGES)” had been established. In this study, refugee children not yet in elementary school and students in lower secondary education are surveyed. This article gives some first insights from the field of the study, details its multistage sampling and study design, reports gross and net sample sizes, and gives response rates. In total, more than 4,000 families were found to have more than 5,000 children of the desired population. About 2,400 refugee children and about the same number of refugee students participated in the first wave in 2017/2018. This is around 50% of the Kindergarten children’s parents and around 44% of the students, whose addresses were sampled, and an interviewer was sent to, could be interviewed. These high response rates point to the effectiveness of the study design. Additionally, they show the strong interest of the considered refugee population in the study.