Individual Consequences of Migration in a Life Course Perspective: Experiences of the First Two Waves of the New German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study (GERPS)

With the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study (GERPS) we have recently started to establish a new and unique longitudinal data set to investigate consequences of international migration from a life course perspective. This task is challenging, as internationally mobile individuals are hard to survey for different reasons (e.g. sampling design and approach, contact strategy, panel maintenance). In our presentation, we would like to report experiences we have made and how we handled with methodical problems.
GERPS is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and surveys international mobile German citizens (recently emigrated abroad or recently re-migrated to Germany) in four consecutive waves within a panel design. Based on a probability sample, GERPS elucidates the individual consequences of cross-border mobility and concentrates on representative longitudinal individual data. It bases mainly on online surveys and covers topics like changing living conditions or life events linked to the migration process.
Our first wave was conducted in November 2018 and the second wave will be started in April 2019. This enables us to present first hand results and experiences of the first two waves of this new and unique longitudinal dataset, which focuses on international migrants. We will mainly reflect the effectiveness of our register-based sampling focusing on traditional indicators of data quality such as response rates or attrition rates. Additionally, we will present our results concerning the success of different incentive approaches (lottery, pre-paid and post-paid incentives) and contact strategies, the used devices to run our online responsive online panel and field experiences we made (e.g. field time and fieldwork during this waves). These results can be very helpful to international researchers in the context of surveying mobile populations.