Measuring Migrants’ Homeland Education

General population survey samples increasingly include migrants, following the growth of the migrant population in Germany over recent years (Statistisches Bundesamt 2019). The growing interest in migrants’ experiences of their migration and integration also lead to an increasing number of surveys specifically targeting migrants: For example, the SCIP survey on socio-cultural integration processes among new immigrants in Europe (Diehl et al. 2015; Gresser and Schacht 2015), the special samples of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP, Kroh et al. 2015; Kühne and Kroh 2017), or special samples/surveys on recent migrants following the so-called “refugee crisis” in 2015 like the SOEP refugee sample (Brücker et al. 2017; Kroh et al. 2016), or the panel of young refugees in the German education system, ReGES (Will et al. 2018). Among the many challenges of survey design that must be tackled when designing surveys of migrants, measuring their socio-demographic characteristics is one area in which just using questionnaire items designed for the German population may not produce data that is true to migrants’ specific background.