Multi-Country Surveys on International Migration: An Assessment of Selection Biases in Destination Countries

Cris Beauchemin, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)

Studies on international migration are hampered by specific methodological issues that are unknown in other fields of demographic research. The most salient is that international migration is, by nature, a phenomenon that involves several countries. As a result, to study seriously the causes and consequences of international migration, a multi-country design is an option recommended by several specialists. This requirement, joined to an objective of representativeness, raises tremendous sampling issues. A possible method to select migrants at destination is to use contacts collected in origin countries. This method is used in the project, Migration between Africa and Europe. In this paper, we attempt to assess the selection biases of migrants’ samples that use snow-balling techniques starting from the country of origin.