A Study of Assimilation Bias in Name-Based Sampling of Migrants

The use of personal names for screening is an increasingly popular sampling technique for migrant populations. Although this is often an effective sampling procedure, very little is known about the properties of this method. Based on a large German survey, this article compares characteristics of respondents whose names have been correctly classified as belonging to a migrant population with respondentswho aremigrants and whose names have not been classified as belonging to a migrant population. Although significant differences were found for some variables even with some large effect sizes, the overall bias introduced by name-based sampling (NBS) is small as long as procedures with small false-negative rates are employed.