Magic bullet or questionable remedy? Discussing the use of social media advertisements to survey hard-to-find migrants


Steffen Poetzschke, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences

Despite a global pandemic and closed borders, the rise of nativism, and more restrictive migration policies the world has seen an increase in the absolute number of migrants. Migration creates both challenges and opportunities for countries that act as hubs for new migrants as well as destination countries that become refuges for them. To successfully navigate this situation, countries and organizations that support migrants need real-time information of good quality to help migrants on their journeys and, eventually, to integrate and succeed in their new homes. However, most traditional survey techniques miss migratory and hard to reach populations. It is thus important to consider new sampling approaches and the issues involved in employing them. This paper discusses the strengths and pitfalls of one promising avenue to reach migrants: sampling through social media sampling advertising. Among social media platforms, no other compares in user numbers to Facebook and the platforms run by its parent company Meta. The company’s platforms are increasingly employed to reach migrant survey respondents (e.g., Erlich, Soehl, and Chen 2021; Gawlewicz et al. 2023; Pötzschke and Weiß 2021). In this paper we discuss opportunities and challenges associated with using social media outlets of a company that faces, at times, harsh criticism for its data-ethics and privacy practices. We discuss the circumstances in which the application of this approach might (and might not) be appropriate, its methodological implications and which ethical aspects need to be considered; drawing on our own experience of sampling refugees for a survey in Canada and several similar research projects over the course of the last eight years.

Non-presenting author: Howard Ramos, Western University

This paper will be presented at the following session: