Measuring Immigrant Populations: Subjective versus Objective Assessments

Abstract

Innumeracy among survey respondents in estimating a country’s immigrant population is a well-known problem for the social sciences. In general, individuals have been found to overestimate the immigrant population at the country level. Furthermore, individuals were found to be especially prone towards overestimating the number if they already were prejudiced against immigrants. If these findings generalize to lower levels of inquiry such as neighborhoods, then research using subjective assessments of immigrant populations in these contexts might be biased as well. By distributing a questionnaire among 142 small and mid-sized companies in the city Gothenburg, Sweden, respondent’s subjective assessments of the immigrant population in their neighborhoods was compared to register data of those neighborhoods. Hence, although the sample was only representative of the working population in small and middle-sized companies in a metropolitan area thus excluding unemployed, retirees, nonworking students, and the rural population of Sweden, the results demonstrated that subjective assessments could correlate well with objective assessments. Overall, the results indicated that the disparity between subjective and objective assessments was lower than what could be expected from previous research findings at the country-level.