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The results of the 2001 study were also used in a joint Danish-German research project concerning integration of immigrants in the two countries. This study was conducted as a collaborative project between the Rockwool Foundation Research Unit and Professor Klaus Zimmermann and his associates at the Institut zur Zukunft der Arbeit (IZA) in Bonn. The results of this study were published in Torben Tranæs and Klaus F. Zimmermann (eds) (2004), Migrants, Work, and the Welfare State (University Press of Southern Denmark). A brief description of the German dataset follows below.

The dataset comprised responses from 5,669 interviews with foreign nationals from Turkey, the former Yugoslavia, Poland, Iran and Lebanon who were legally resident in Germany. Residents from these countries comprise two thirds of all foreign residents from non-Western countries. In contrast to the Danish dataset from the 2001 survey, the German dataset did not include immigrants from Pakistan, Somalia or Vietnam (Bauer and Nielsen, 2004).

The questionnaire used for the 2001 Danish survey formed the basis for the questionnaire used in Germany. This procedure produced an ideal data set for a comparative study. The Danish questionnaire was translated into German in cooperation with Infratest Sozialforschung. Some adaptation was necessary to the situation in Germany, however, with respect to a number of questions connected with education and the labour market. While a large part of the information needed for the Danish interviewees could be extracted from administrative registers, this was not possible to the same extent for the German survey, both because the German registration system is not as highly developed as that of Denmark and because access to the data is more restricted. This made it necessary to include some extra questions in the German survey, for example about respondents’ income.

The German dataset was collected between April and August 2002 by means of face-to-face interviews using the CAPI method (Computer Assisted Personal Interviews). This contrasted with the Danish survey, where the principal data collection method involved telephone interviews. In Germany, an attempt was always made to conduct the interview in German, thus enabling the interviewer to make an assessment of the respondent’s proficiency in the language. If the

interviewee had difficulty in understanding German, the interviewer could make use of a printed copy of the questions in the respondent’s own language – and if necessary, also a printed list of the possible answers. In addition, the interviewer had the possibility of using an interpreter to resolve any problems of communication.

Unlike Denmark, Germany has no central civil registration system from which a sample can be drawn. A different selection method therefore had to be used. The method applied was based on local Einwohnermeldeamt (population registers), in which every legal resident in Germany must enrol. First, Infratest Sozialforschung went to the local population registers in the 100 largest towns in the former West Germany and the three largest towns in the former East Germany to obtain information about the number of immigrants and their nationalities in each of these areas. On the basis of this information, it was decided that 500 sampling points would be used. These points would be randomly distributed among the 103 towns that formed the basis for the sample selection, though this did not necessarily mean that all 103 towns would be represented in the survey. It was planned that around 5,500 interviews would be conducted on the basis of these sampling points, with 1,100 interviews for each nationality and 11 interviews per sampling point. This procedure for selecting the sample meant that the sample population was composed mainly of immigrants who lived in urban areas.

In contrast to the Danish 2001 survey sample, the German dataset was composed entirely of people with foreign nationality. It is not possible to distinguish naturalised Germans in the population registers. In these respects, then, the Danish and German samples were not completely comparable. The problem was somewhat reduced, however, by the fact that the rules for naturalisation were much tougher in Germany at that time than in Denmark, so that the proportion of immigrants who became naturalised Germans was significantly smaller in Germany than in Denmark.

The 5,669 completed and usable interviews in the German survey represent a response rate of 43.5%. Response rates varied between nationalities from 37.3% for nationals of the former Yugoslavia to 51.0% for Lebanese nationals. The overall response rate was on a par with that in other similar surveys in Germany. Difficulty in contacting the selected respondents at the addresses given was the primary reason for non-completion of interviews, accounting for 22.9% of the selected sample. In addition, 16% of the selected sample population refused to participate in the survey.

Among the completed interviews, there were a significant number of people who refused to answer some specific questions, in particular those concerning income. Respondents were asked to specify the types of income received in the month prior to the interview. In the case of households consisting of more than

one person, 34% of respondents failed to answer the question on the gross income of the household. Unfortunately, there is little information available that would give an indication of the degree to which these missing responses may have biased the estimates obtained in the regressions made on the basis of income.

As with the Danish survey, a check was made on the representativeness of the German sample by comparing the distributions of background variables such as gender, age, region and nationality in the sample with those of the entire population in Germany of people from Turkey, the former Yugoslavia, Poland, Iran and Lebanon. Data for this total population were obtained from the

Ausländerzentralregister (AZR), which is an administrative register of all foreigners legally resident in Germany. The check on representativeness covered only people aged 15 and over. The register, however, is not completely reliable, since a number of foreigners – especially Poles, who are often in Germany on a short-term basis – fail to sign off from the register when they leave the country. The comparisons made reveal a certain bias with respect to the background variables examined. The conclusion is therefore that the German sample was less representative than the corresponding Danish sample.

As mentioned previously, the procedure for selecting the sample was designed to ensure that the number of people interviewed was approximately equal for each of the five nationalities, in order to make it possible to carry out separate analyses for each nationality. Table 2.3 shows that the distribution of nationalities in the sample was indeed approximately equal, even though, for example, the proportion of people from Turkey was larger than the proportion of people from Lebanon (26% of the sample as opposed to 17%).

This procedure meant that the sample did not reflect the distribution of nationalities in the population as a whole. As can be seen from the table, Turks and people from the former Yugoslavia together accounted for 85% of the total population in Germany from the five countries at that time, but they comprised only 44% of the sample. To make the sample representative of the whole population with respect to the distribution of nationalities it was necessary to weight the results so that respondents from Turkey and the former Yugoslavia were weighted more heavily and people from Poland, Iran and Lebanon less heavily. Calculations showed that the weighting procedure improved the overall representativeness of the sample with regard to geography, gender and length of residence.

Table 2.3. Distribution of nationalities in the German dataset and in the whole population of immigrants from the five countries. Ages 15 and over. Percent.

German sample Register of resident _{foreigners (AZR)}

Turkey 26.0 54.0 Former Yugoslavia 17.9 31.1 Poland 21.5 10.6 Iran 17.8 3.1 Lebanon 16.8 1.2 Total 100.0 100.0 Number of observations 5,669 2,713,299

Sources: RFMS-G (Rockwool Foundation Migratory Survey-Germany), Ausländerzentralregister

(AZR) (the German central register for foreign nationals), and own calculations.

2.5. Summary

The first source of new knowledge about immigrants and second generation immigrants was comprised by the two questionnaire surveys (the main surveys) conducted among the eight largest groups of non-Western immigrants and second generation immigrants in Denmark at that time, these being people from the former Yugoslavia, Iran, Lebanon, Pakistan, Poland, Somalia, Turkey and Vietnam. In the first of these questionnaire surveys (the 1999 survey), 3,615 interviews were completed during the period from November 1998 to July 1999, while in the second survey (the 2001 survey) 3,262 interviews were completed during the first half of 2001. A total of 2,348 of the people interviewed in the 2001 survey were re-interviewees from the first survey. The response rate for each of the surveys was close to 60%. A comparison of the samples and of the entire population of immigrants from the eight countries showed approximately the same distributions with respect to gender, age, marital status, labour market status and income.

In order to be able to compare immigrants and second generation immigrants from the eight countries with the entire population of Denmark, a selection of questions from the two main surveys were also asked in the “omnibus surveys” of the entire Danish population conducted by Statistics Denmark.

The data used for the study also included three datasets extracted from the Danish Civil Registration System, which contains information about all persons legally resident in Denmark (the de jure population of the country). The three datasets consisted of information about non-Western immigrants and second generation immigrants, Western immigrants and second generation immigrants, and Danes. In the case of the first group, the entire population aged between 16

and 70 was used. Analyses of the other two groups were based on random samples of 25% and 2% respectively of the full populations.

In Chapter 7 of this book an account is given of the economic consequences of immigration based on a special model, known as the Law Model. This model was developed at the end of the 1970s, and at that time was based on a sample of 3.3% of the Danish population. A large amount of personal information about the people in that sample, taken primarily from the registers held by Statistics Denmark, was linked to the sample. The high level of detail which can be obtained in calculations using the Law Model with respect to income transfers from the public purse to individuals and to the amount individuals pay in taxes makes it very suitable for analysing the socioeconomic effects of immigration. The results of the 2001 survey were also used in a joint Danish-German project to study the integration of immigrants in the two countries. Based on the Danish questionnaire, the same set of information was acquired in the two countries thus providing an ideal basis for a comparative study. The German dataset comprised responses from 5,669 interviews with foreign nationals from Turkey, the former Yugoslavia, Poland, Iran and Lebanon who were legally resident in Germany. In contrast to the Danish 2001 data, the German dataset did not cover immigrants from Pakistan, Somalia and Vietnam.

References

Bauer, Thomas and Niels-Kenneth Nielsen. 2004. “Data Description”, in Torben Tranæs and Klaus Zimmermann (eds) 2004, Migrants, Work, and the Welfare State. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 405-427.

Coleman, David and Eskil Wadensjö. 1999. Indvandringen til Danmark. Internationale og nationale perspektiver. Copenhagen: Spektrum.

Coleman, David and Eskild Wadensjö. 1999. Immigration to Denmark. International and national perspectives. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.

Danmarks Statistik. Nyheder og Information fra Danmarks Statistik 1998:1. Copenhagen.

Gulløy, Elisabeth, Svein Blom and Agnes Aall Ritland. 1997. Levevilkår blant innvandrere 1996. Dokumentasjonsrapport med tabeller. Oslo: Statistisk Sentralbyro.

Møller, Birgit and Lise Togeby. 1999. Oplevet diskrimination. En undersøgelse blandt etniske minoriteter. Copenhagen: Nævnet for Etnisk Ligestilling.

Nielsen, Niels-Kenneth and Søren Pedersen. 2000. “Databeskrivelse”, in Gunnar Viby Mogensen and Poul Chr. Matthiessen (eds), 2000. Integration i Danmark omkring årtusindeskiftet. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 379-406.

Nielsen, Niels-Kenneth. 2002. “Databeskrivelse”, in Gunnar Viby Mogensen and Poul Chr. Matthiessen (eds), 2002. Indvandrerne og arbejdsmarkedet. Copenhagen: Spektrum, 327-348.

Tranæs, Torben and Klaus Zimmermann (eds.). 2004. Migrants, Work, and the Welfare State. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark.