Measuring Immigrant Populations: Subjective versus Objective Assessments
Innumeracy among survey respondents in estimating a country’s immigrant population is a well-known problem for the social sciences. In general, individuals have been found to overestimate the immigrant population at the country level. Furthermore, individuals were found to be especially prone towards overestimating the number if they already were prejudiced against immigrants. If these findings generalize to lower levels of inquiry such as neighborhoods, then research using subjective assessments of immigrant populations in these contexts might be biased as well. By distributing a questionnaire among 142 small and mid-sized companies in the city Gothenburg, Sweden, respondent’s subjective assessments of the …