Using Smartphone Technology for Research on Refugees: Evidence from Germany

Florian Keusch, Mariel M. Leonard, Christoph Sajons () and Susan Steiner

Sociological Methods & Research, 2021, vol. 50, issue 4, 1863-1894

Abstract: Researchers attempting to survey refugees over time face methodological issues because of the transient nature of the target population. In this article, we examine whether applying smartphone technology could alleviate these issues. We interviewed 529 refugees and afterward invited them to four follow-up mobile web surveys and to install a research app for passive mobile data collection. Our main findings are as follows: First, participation in mobile web surveys declines rapidly and is rather selective with significant coverage and nonresponse biases. Second, we do not find any factor predicting types of smartphone ownership, and only low reading proficiency is significantly correlated with app nonparticipation. However, obtaining sufficiently large samples is challenging—only 5 percent of the eligible refugees installed our app. Third, offering a 30 Euro incentive leads to a statistically insignificant increase in participation in passive mobile data collection.

Keywords: refugees; smartphones; mobile web surveys; passive mobile data collection; coverage; participation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0049124119852377 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:somere:v:50:y:2021:i:4:p:1863-1894

DOI: 10.1177/0049124119852377

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Sociological Methods & Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().