Methodological and Organisational Aspects of the POLITIS-interview study on active

civic participation of immigrants

Dita Vogel

POLITIS

Interdisciplinary Center for Education and Communication in Migration

Processes (IBKM)

Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg

Ammerländer Heerstr. 114-118/ Postbox 2503

26111 Oldenburg

dita.vogel@uni-oldenburg.de

University of Oldenburg. POLITIS-Working paper No.3/2006

www.uni-oldenburg.de/politis-europe/webpublications

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POLITIS – a European research project

Project information

Populations of immigrant origin are growing and changing in Europe. POLITIS explores

the potential of immigrants for the development of a civically active European society,

starting with foreign students’ perceptions of Europe and focusing on sustained social

and political activities of immigrants. POLITIS is the short title for the research

project “Building Europe with New Citizens? An Inquiry into the Civic Participation of Naturalised Citizens and Foreign Residents in 25 Countries”.

The study is divided into 3 parts:

• Part I: A comparative literature review on immigrant civic participation in 25 member states

• Part II: A comparative analysis of foreign students' perceptions of Europe, exploring the potential of their ideas about Europe with the help of essays and focus group discussions

• Part III: A comparative analysis of more than 150 qualitative interviews with civic activists of immigrant origin in the EU to identify favourable and unfavourable biographical and national conditions for active participation

The POLITIS Working Paper Series

POLITIS working paper series may include project-related contributions by all project

partners. The main project researchers in the consortium constitute the editorial

committee of the working paper series. It is editorial policy to secure quality standards

while encouraging the discussion of results that are preliminary or limited in scope.

Funding Acknowledgement

This research project has been funded by the European Commission in the sixth

framework, priority 7, Citizens and governance in a knowledge based society.

www.cordis.lu/citizens

Consortium

Interdisciplinary Centre for Education and Communication in Migration Processes (IBKM) www.uni-oldenburg.de/IBKM

Hellenic Foundation of European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) Athens. www.eliamep.gr

Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. European University Institute (EUI) Florence. www.iue.it/RSCAS

Churches’ Commission of Migrants in Europe (CCME) Brussels. www.cec-kek.org/content/ccme.shtml

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Abstract

So far, there is little research about highly engaged immigrants and their interaction

with receiving societies. In order to be able to reach valuable interpretations, the

POLITIS research project has created an innovative research design, adjusting the logic

of dissimilarity sampling to an internationally comparative setting (horizontal

dissimilarity sampling). A unique research process was organised: Students and PhD-

researchers from all over the world who studied in all EU countries took part as

interviewers and discussants. This paper does not only explain the logic behind this

approach and the methods applied but also documents how POLITIS took up the huge

organisational and educational challenge that was involved.

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Contents

1. Introduction .........................................................................................................5

2. Research Design...................................................................................................5

3. Research partnership ..........................................................................................6

3.1. The research partnership ................................................................................. 6

3.2. The student partners/ interviewers ................................................................... 8

4. Interview process ...............................................................................................10

4.1. Selection of interview partners ....................................................................... 11

4.2. Interview Conduction ..................................................................................... 13

5. Analysis...............................................................................................................16

5.1. Database creation and first coding ................................................................ 16

5.2. Aspect analysis ............................................................................................... 20

6. Final Remarks....................................................................................................20

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1. Introduction

So far, there is little research about highly engaged immigrants and their interaction

with receiving societies. Quantitative research usually needs a much broader focus to

generate enough responses in a survey. There are large scale studies both on political

participation (Verba, Schlozman et al. 1995 (2002)) – from reading newspapers to

standing for political office – and about voluntary activities (Dekker and Halman 2003)

– from helping neighbours to leading charity organisations. This body of research

particularly helps to understand individual factors that influence participation.

Specific research on immigrants usually also focusses on political participation (Jacobs

and Tillie 2004) or on participation in immigrant and ethnic organisations (Penninx,

Kraal et al. 2004). This type of research usually defines participation broadly as well,

while taking one or a low number of nationalities in one or more cities as starting point.

It aims at analysing the interaction between individual, local and national factors, often

in the framework of the social capital theory and in an internationally comparative

setting. This body of research particularly helps to understand the local and national

opportunity structures that influence political participation of ethnic minorities (see also

the ongoing project Localmultidem http://www.um.es/localmultidem).

We build on these sets of literature and focus on the crucial group of highly active first

generation immigrants and their process of activation. We want to explore how they

describe their civic activity career in the receiving country and how they interpret

individual and societal factors that support or inhibit civic partipation.

In order to be able to reach valuable interpretations, we have created an innovative

research design, adjusting the logic of dissimilarity sampling to an internationally

comparative setting. We organised a unique research process: It involves students and

PhD-researchers from all over the world who study in all EU countries as interviewers

and discussants. This paper does not only explain the logic behind this approach but

also documents how we took up the huge organisational and educational challenge that

was involved.

Section 2 explains the research design in more detail. Section 3 introduces to the

research partnership. Section 4 gives account of how the interview process was

organised. Section 5 is devoted to those steps of analysis that are of importance for the

whole research project.

Being finalised in September 2006, this is partly a retrospective paper and partly a

prospective paper. It describes the partnership formation retrospectively, while leaving

the description of the database to another working paper in preparation. Whether the

ideas will fully work out can only be said after the analysis is finalised.

2. Research Design

As the civically active immigrants are a minority in a minority, we have opted for a

research strategy that is inspired by the ‘most different cases’ (Sartori 1991) or ‘contrast

6

of context’ (Skocpol and Somers 1980) analysis in the political sciences, usually

comparing national settings that vary in a large number of aspects, while showing

similar features with regard to the chosen topic. In qualitative interviewing, a research

strategy with a similar logic is called ‘dissimilarity sampling’.

“You interview people with background characteristics different from those of your original

interviewees, or you interview people in varying settings or who work in places other than the one

you researched. You want to see whether the themes you have discovered hold in these different

situations. When people with diverse backgrounds or in different situations behave the same way or

express the same values as your original interviewees, you gain confidence that what you have

learned holds more broadly.” (Rubin and Rubin 1995:74)

These strategies have the advantage that researchers can build a generalising argument

in spite of a low number of cases. How far the generalisation can go and how

convincing it is depends on the specific questions. Rubin and Rubin assumed that

researchers conduct new interviews with dissimilar context conditions, once they have

discovered specific patterns in their original interviews. The search of new interview

contexts is theory-driven, as researchers have to define the ‘different’ situations from

their theoretical expectations.

POLITIS researchers intend to apply this logic, but the concrete steps of analysis follow

a different pattern:

• Interviewing: A high number of interviewers contribute three interviews with

civically active men and women from a high variety of circumstances in all EU

states.

• Centralised database creation and first coding: Interviews are consolidated in

one database and coded by one person according to a theoretically inspired

coding scheme as discussed in the research team.

• Decentralised aspect analysis: Individual researchers or groups of researchers

analyse different aspects of the research topic, going back and forth between the

full dataset and subsets. At this stage, theoretically driven sampling strategies as

described above can be used in order to make a convincing case. We call this

strategy ‘horizontal dissimilarity sampling’.

Thus, the project involves a high division of labour and a high degree of

internationalisation. In the next section, the research partnership is described, before the

different research steps are explained in more detail.

3. Research partnership

This section starts with a general introduction to the research partnership and describes

in more details how the international interviewers were found and chosen.

3.1. The research partnership

The POLITIS research consortium consists of three research partners and one non-

governmental organisation (NGO).

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• Coordinator and research partner: University of Oldenburg, Interdisciplinary

Centre for Education and Communication in Migratory Processes in Oldenburg

(IBKM)

• Research partner: Hellenic Foundation for Foreign and European Policy in

Athens (ELIAMEP)

• Research partner: Robert Schuman Centre at the European University Institute

in Florence (EUI)

• NGO: Churches' Commission for Migrants in Europe in Brussels (CCME)

The research team consists of researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds who

all have experience and training in qualitative interview analysis1. The research team

organised country reports, interviewing and training of interviewers and conducts

analysis. The NGO partner consults the research partners and coordinates the

dissemination of results in the last stage of the project.

Figure 1: POLITIS project structure

www.uni-oldenburg.de/politis-

europe

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Interviewer-Network: Students and young academics

from all over the world in all EU countries

Research team

Coordination

IBKM Oldenburg

urg

ELIAMEP

Athens

EUI

Florence

Country experts for 25 EU states

CCME Brussels NGO

1Dita Vogel and Anna Triandafyllidou (with research and supervisory functions) Carol Brown,

Norbert Cyrus, Ruby Gropas, Ankica Kosic (research team members), Rudolf Leiprecht and Bo

Strath (with advisory function).

8

In a first stage of the project, the research team organised the writing of country reports

about each EU country. Country reports give an insight into migration history and

policy and review studies and/ or grey literature and expert knowledge about civic

participation of immigrants (http://www.uni-oldenburg.de/politis-europe/9812.html).

The 35 involved country experts form a network for advice and information on

individual countries. Some experts were involved in the training process, and country

reports serve as a reference during the interview analysis. Consulting country reports

and country experts are a means to gain additional context information, if necessary.

3.2. The student partners/ interviewers

Identifying interviewees in many different states and from many different national and

personal backgrounds seemed to be the best approach to get a large variation of context

conditions, without knowing exactly which conditions would turn out to be the most

relevant. The concrete decision to try and sample third country immigrants as

interviewers in all countries of the European Union is not due to methodological

considerations. It was our assumption that such a strategy would appeal to the EU as a

funding institution because it has the side effect of creating training, interaction and

knowledge exchange in the whole European Union, thus contributing to a European

research area.

However, such a research strategy enlarges the problems of access and understanding

due to language variation and cultural difference. To overcome this difficulty, the team

intended to recruit interviewers who share English as a common working language with

the research team, who share an academic background and interest, and who have some

relation to the topic with regard to methods, own research interests, or own activism. At

the same time, they should be migrants themselves and thus also share a common

language and cultural characteristics with the interviewees. As this involved a large

international interviewer team, a joint training and discussion of results seemed to be a

necessary precaution against misunderstandings and assure reliability of data.

In order to recruit interviewers, the POLITIS-team produced an information leaflet and

a print-out notice-board poster in July 2004, inviting students from non-EU states

studying in EU states to apply for participation in the project. The application was rather

demanding, involving a letter of motivation, a CV and an essay of 800 to 1200 words

discussing the question “What does Europe mean to you personally?”2 The call for

students was distributed across the 25 EU states between August and November 2004.

This mainly involved extensive mailings to international organisations, university

departments consulting foreign students, individual researchers, mailing lists, other EU

projects and our network of country experts, as well as to some immigrant media.

In addition, we adjusted our efforts to the numbers of foreign students in the country –

in countries like Germany and the UK with high numbers of foreign students,

2 The essays are analysed in another part of the project (http://www.uni-oldenburg.de/politis-

europe/15615.html).

9

recruitment efforts were lower and more focussed as we feared to receive more

applications than we would be able to handle, but in countries with very low numbers of

foreign students like Luxembourg or Slovakia, we used all plausible contacts.

Unfortunately, there was no way to check to what extent the target group was really

reached, as most applications were handed on the deadline or the day before. The

coordinator received about 180 applications by the deadline, of which 154 were found

valid after a first check. Invalid applications were mainly handed in by students who

lived and learned outside the EU, e.g. in Moldavia or the USA. However, applications

were unevenly distributed between the countries of study. For instance, we received

many applications from Third Country students in Germany and Hungary, but none

from Cyprus and only one from Austria. The partners agreed to extent the deadline and

soften eligibility criteria for countries with less than 5 applications. In the second call,

EU students with considerable third country experience, or experience in the subject,

were also allowed to apply for the selected countries under the second deadline.

After the second deadline, a total of 254 valid and about 30 invalid applications had

arrived. Each individual application was assessed on the basis of the letter, the CV and

the essay. The team looked for academic potential, thoughtful essays in acceptable

English, and a credible interest in project issues. Some applicants were solely chosen on

this basis, because their academic potential and closeness to the topic was so high that

the team expected high quality interviews and improvements of the training process for

less experienced students. However, the final selection depended not only on the

individual potential of the applicants. In a project meeting, the research team made an

effort to find a balanced composition that included all countries of study and a wide

variety of countries of origin. It was intended to have some clusters of interviewers in

order to have the chance for qualitative cross-country comparison of interviews from

one country of origin. For example, there were many very good applicants from Ukraine

in different countries, so a cluster of interviewers from this background in different

countries was selected, but the application situation did not allow for such a cluster for

any one Latin American country, so that Latin Americans from different countries of

origin and study were selected. To summarise, the selection of interviewers was largely

determined by the expectation to get good interviews, to achieve a wide variation of

context conditions and to allow for clusters of countries and regions of origin. This

selection strategy – in combination with unequal drop-out rates – determines the

structure of the interviewee sample with regard to countries of origin as each

interviewer was supposed to interview activists from their own background.

Seventy-five applicants finally confirmed their participation. It was not possible to

reach an equal representation of men and women, as women were highly

overrepresented among all applicants and among the outstanding students. The majority

of selected participants were female (50f, 25m). Thirty participants were working on

their doctoral thesis or had just finished it. The other participants were mostly advanced

master or diploma students, but some undergraduates have also been chosen because of

their convincing applications and specific country of origin or study.

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71 students and PhD-researchers took part in the first summer school, and three

advanced students who were not able not participate in the summer school were still

allowed to do interviews on the basis of the manual and individual counselling. In the

end, 63 interviewers were able to deliver interviews. They received a modest

compensation for their work, ranging from 100 to 600 Euro depending on length and

translation necessity. Of those, 56 participated in the second summer school.

Considering the age, the amount of work and international mobility of the interviewers,

we consider the drop-out rate to be very low. We had expected a drop-out of about one

third. We assume that the low drop-out rate is not only due to our focussed selection,

motivating presentations and exercises at the first summer school, to affirmative

counselling during the field stage and to interview compensation, but also to the good

atmosphere of the first summer school that was largely created by the participants

themselves.

The following table shows the final distribution of interviewers by region of origin.

Table 1: Interviewers by region of origin

Continent/ Region Number of Interviewers

Africa 8

America 9

Asia 9

Former Soviet Union (Ukraine, Russia,

Belarus) 10

Current EU Accession Countries (Bulgaria

and Romania) 8

Other European Non-EU Countries (Albania,

Serbia, Turkey3) 5

EU Countries 14

Total 63

4. Interview process

The selected participants were trained at a first summer school in Delphi, Greece, in

July 2005. The core of the summer school both in terms of time and contents focussed

on interviewer training. It involved plenary introductions and discussions and exercises

in small groups. The training started with a comparative familiarisation with key

features of immigrant participation in the country of study. Small groups of students

3 Turkey is here summarized under ‘other European’. However, we are aware that Turkey is not always

categorized under Europe.

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from contrasting countries - for example eight students from the Netherlands, Greece

and Estonia - discussed concrete questions comparatively, based on reading country

reports that were distributed before.4 Further training broadly followed the interviewer

manual provided to the participants: identifying and contacting suitable interviewees,

preparing interviews with the main questions, conducting the interviews, transcribing

and translating.5 All sessions included practical exercises.

The selection of interviewers and the conduction of interviews as it was foreseen is

described in more detail below.

4.1. Selection of interview partners

While political participation is more about ‘voice’, the voluntary sector literature is

more concerned about the ‘support’ side of active civic participation. For the purpose of

our study, we used a broad concept of ‘civic participation’ as we assume that support

and voice often overlap for highly active persons (Vogel and Triandafyllidou 2005). In

addition, unpaid and partly paid activities may change in the life-cycle and overlap.

The study is interested in people who continuously and substantially devote time and

energy to activities like:

- giving a voice to societal concerns, for example in parties, parliaments, or in

associations and movements focussed on specific issues like gender equality,

environment, neighbourhood issues, etc. or to specific concerns of immigrant

groups, for example in immigrants’ rights, fighting discrimination and racism,

and the cultural expression of immigrants.

- organising solidarity and self-help.

These are often – but not necessarily – persons who have undertaken some sort of

function in an organisation.

First generation immigrants were chosen as a specific focus because immigration is

expected to rise in the European Union. The term ‘first generation immigrants’ refers

only to persons who were born abroad (outside the country under study) and immigrated

as adults or minors. For a better focus on future European immigration concerns, we

restricted our selection on people born outside the current European Union (of 25

states), excluding EU citizens that are living in another EU member states. Certainly

their experience is also very interesting, but we did not want to mix issues of EU

integration and migrant integration in this study.

Research partners distributed interviewers in three groups to offer them guidance and

advice during the process of selecting interviewees, mainly by e-mail. The supervisor

had to confirm the choice of interviewees. The general idea was that each interviewer

should interview three active immigrants from their own background. Interviewers from

4 Country reports are available from the POLITIS website under http://www.uni-oldenburg.de/politis-

europe/9812.html. 5 The interviewer manual can be downloaded from the project’s website (http://www.uni-

oldenburg.de/politis-europe/download/POLITIS_Interviewer_Manual.pdf).

12

EU-countries had to arrange interviews with immigrants of a nationality that they were

familiar with and with which they were sharing a common language. In order to

minimise expenses and achieve high comparability, interviewers were advised to

concentrate on the local level.

The selection strategy was summarised in the interviewer manual (see table 2). The

selection strategy had to be general enough to be applied in many different settings by

interviewers with many different academic and national backgrounds, while generating

an interview dataset that would allow for the selection of subsets of interviews with

sufficient numbers. We decided to keep the number of variables low to make the

selection feasible and keep up the motivation of the interviewers.

Table 2: Interviewee selection strategy

Interview 1: Political activist

Is this person a local city councillor?

If not, is he/she a member of a local advisory body for immigrants or foreign

nationals?

If not, is this person someone who has been an unsuccessful candidate for these

positions or held one of these positions before?

If not, does this person perform a function or hold a position in a political party?

If not, does this person perform any other function or hold any other position in

politics?

Interview 2: Activist in important ethnic/ multi-ethnic/ immigrant association

The second interview should focus on immigrants who are mainly active on behalf of

their ethnic group or of immigrants in general. Think of the founders of cultural

associations, socially active religious leaders, initiators of informal self-help groups,

people organising exile parties, and/or leading activists in protest movements.

Interview 3: Diversify your choice!

If interviews 1 and 2 are planned with men, interview a woman and vice versa!

If interviews 1 and 2 are planned with citizens of the receiving country, look for a

person with the citizenship of the country of origin and vice versa!

If interviews 1 and 2 are planned with younger activists, look for an older person and

vice versa!

Source:http://www.uni-oldenburg.de/politis-

europe/download/POLITIS_Interviewer_Manual.pdf

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Requiring them to look for an interviewee in local politics was a choice in order to be

able to link to the relevant literature on political participation and to make sure to

include some interviewees that are connected to activities in the majority society of the

receiving country. Secondly, the inclusion of an activist in an ethnic or immigrant

organisation was required and explained with examples. This intended to make sure to

cover immigrant-specific fields of activities in the broadest sense.

Thirdly, we asked for variations with regard to age and gender, as important variations

could be expected with regard to these factors, especially as age often correlates with

time after migration in case of immigrants. In addition, approximate age and gender are

easy to know before someone conducts the interview which is not the case for many

other factors that have been observed to be important variables influencing civic

participation, as for example income and educational level. Therefore, asking for

variation in the citizenship status was the more difficult task because it is not always

known.

The supervisors were handling the selection procedure in a flexible way. All

requirements had the implicit addition: ‘if possible’. The priority was to get interviews

that suited the general definitions of our study and on encouraging interviewers to look

for interviewees according to the selection strategy, while being aware that it would not

always work out. For example, it was clear from the beginning that a number of

interviewers would not be able to interview a local political activist because there was

no one of their nationality in their city, but we wanted to make sure that every

interviewer searched for such an interviewee before turning to other and potentially

easier options.

While some student partners were able to arrange three interviews with suitable

interviewees with no major problems in a short time-span, others had considerable

problems in finding, approaching and conducting interviews. In some cases, researchers

facilitated the process by sending letters to the potential interviewees.

4.2. Interview Conduction

There are many different typologies of qualitative interviews. The interviews with

active immigrants are modelled similar to the problem-centred interview as described

by Witzel (Witzel 1985). This interview type involves the focus on a particular problem

or topic. While the interviewer sets the frame, defines the topic and follows up on

relevant questions, the interviewees largely structure the interview.

With regard to interview conduction, we largely followed the path laid out in Rubin and

Rubin (2005) as summarised for the purpose of interviewer training by Norbert Cyrus.6

Interviewers were trained to find a balance in being responsive to interviewees while

not losing the main questions of the research. The main idea was to get interviewees to

6 The 1995 edition was used for the interviewer training, while the completely revised 2005 edition

was used as a reference for analysis (http://www.uni-oldenburg.de/politis-

europe/download/POLITIS_Introduction_to_interview_conduction.pdf)

14

talk about their activation biography in the receiving country from their very first

activity to the present activities and make them comment on obstacles and

encouragements in this process, to get a rich spectrum of stories about becoming active,

and a variety of thoughtful comments on specific conditions framing the situation of

immigrants in general and the possibilities to become active in particular. Interviewers

were encouraged to go for first hand experience and concrete examples rather than for

general political statements which may easily be found with publicly active persons.

The interview guide included main questions and probes (see table 3). The training

included excercises how to use this as a guide in a flexible way, ideally not interrupting

the flow of the conversation while covering all main questions.

With our high distribution of labour in the interview process, precautions were taken to

assure the authenticity and reliability of the data (Steinke 2003). All interviewers

received simple tape recorders and tapes but were encouraged to use better equipment

when available. They had to prepare a word for word transcription of the recorded

interviews and to hand in the tapes.

In most cases, interviewers had to translate their interviews from their mother tongue

into English. With this procedure given, it is clear that we are aiming for the content of

the interviews, and that specific conversational analysis or interpretation of meaningful

expressions or original formulations will only be the exceptional case when the original

transcript is consulted. The quality of translations depends on the English proficiency of

the interviewer.

All tapes, transcribed and translated interviews were collected. Interviewers were

informed that no interviews without full documentation would be accepted, and that

supervisors would check randomly whether tapes, transcripts and translations

corresponded. Supervisors read all incoming interview translations in their group within

a short time after reception in order to be able to give feedback to the interviewers and

ask them for clarifications if necessary.

To include the necessary context for interpreting the interviews, interviewers were

encouraged to make ample use of explanatory footnotes (e.g. for explaining

abbreviations and functions of organisations). In addition, they were instructed – in line

with the problem-centred interview approach (Witzel 2000) - to fill out a table with

socio-demographic features of the interviewee, summarising the interviewee’s

participation biography and describing the interview situation. As there had been some

empty fields and some misunderstandings about the table, all interviewers were asked to

complement and confirm the socio-demographic data by e-mail in June 2006.

15

POLITIS interview guide

1. Personal description of the current activities:

I would like to interview you for the POLITIS research project because I understand

that you are an immigrant who is actively involved in this society. I’m probably

unaware of all your areas of engagement, and I would therefore be grateful if you could

first describe shortly your current fields of activities, and then tell me which positions

you currently occupy.

- What is the most important activity for you?

2. Questions on how the individual became involved in these activities:

I would like to learn more about how you personally became involved in these

activities. When and how did you start to be active, and how did your activities change

and develop?

- Biographical genesis of engagement: How did you become so active? What was your first

activity on behalf of a group or the community? You can think as far back as school or youth

groups. Were there any particular circumstances that influenced you to become active at that

time?

- Beginning of engagement in country of immigration: What was your first activity on behalf of a

group or the community in this country? Can you remember any particular circumstances that

motivated or caused you to first become active?

- Trajectories: Have there been any important changes in your activities? Did you change your

field of activity, the organisations, or your targets? Do you remember any particular

circumstances or events that led to these changes?

3. Questions on supportive and discouraging conditions in this country:

Can you discuss who or what supports or discourages you and your activities?

- Supporting conditions:

o You spent a lot of time, energy, and perhaps money for your engagement. Family and

friends: What do your family and your friends think/say about your involvement?

o The state: Is there any support given by state authorities? Is the support sufficient?

o The society: What is your personal impression? Does this society acknowledge and

reward active participation of immigrants? Have you sensed that there is a difference in

the level of ‘social acknowledgement’ assigned to mainstream/ host country

associations when compared to immigrant groups?

o Inciting others: As an active immigrant, you have probably had some experiences that

involved making other people interested in committing themselves to activities. How

do you proceed to convince other (younger?) people to undertake activities or become

more involved?

- Discouraging conditions:

16

o Do you sometimes feel discouraged? When and why?

o In general: What do you see as the main factors that discourage engagement in this

country? Which conditions are particularly detrimental for becoming active?

- Projective question: Provided you became the political leader responsible for this country, what

would be the first action that you would take to address the issue of immigrants’ active civic

participation?

4. Final question:

Is there anything else that you think is important for us to know?

Source:http://www.uni-oldenburg.de/politis-

europe/download/POLITIS_Interviewer_Manual.pdf

5. Analysis

Based on the first reading, supervisors prepared papers on the structure of the database,

quality and contents of interviews that informed further analytical steps and is

consolidated into POLITIS working paper 4/2006. All analysis will be facilitated by

specialised CAQDAS software. Further analysis consists of a centralised database

creation and first coding, based on discussion in the research team, and the decentralised

analysis of specific aspects and questions within the broader topic of highly active

immigrants’ civic participation.

5.1. Database creation and first coding

All translations were entered into a database using the software MaxQda that was

selected after some tests with different packages. In a first step, the team identified

issues and developed a coding scheme. The structure and content of the codes had been

developed in several discussion rounds between the POLITIS researchers. It was tested

afterwards – the aim was to have a coding structure that is linked to our conceptual

approach (Vogel and Triandafyllidou 2005), accommodates different aspects of analysis

that are covered by different team members, is short and easy to handle and allows for

quick orientation in the full database and meaningful selection of subsets of interviews.

The resulting coding structure makes sure that references to activities can be followed

along activation processes that references to migration processes can be retrieved as

well as all references to motivation, individual resources, and the societal opportunity

structure. In addition, we wanted to keep a record of interviewees policy proposal and

particularly noteworthy quotes, with the latter concededly involving a high degree of

subjectivity. A number of attributes have been added so that interviews can be selected

with regard to specific socio-demographic features (table 4).

One person has been responsible for the database creation and coding. Carol Brown

inserted all interviews in the database, read and coded them and wrote memos about

17

particular features of the interviews. If applicable, obvious typing or grammar mistakes

in the translations were corrected.When in doubt, the translations were kept as prepared

by the interviewers and accepted by the supervisors.

Table 3. Coding scheme

CODE SUB-CODE EXPLANATION / DEFINITION

Process Summary Section entitled ‘short protocol on interview setting/location

and process’

Summary

Informa-

tion Activism Summary Section entitled ‘short summary on participant activism’

Come

Statements about decision to come to receiving country and

how this was brought about.

Stay

Statements about decision to stay in receiving country and

efforts to realise this decision.

Migration

History

Naturalise

Statements about decision to naturalise and efforts to

acquire citizenship.

Origin/Prior Statements about activities in country of origin or prior to

arrival in receiving country.

First/Early Statements about first activity(s) in receiving country.

Ethnic

Statements about activities in organisation or network

explicitly mobilising around one ethnicity, e.g. with a single

national, cultural or religious focus (could also be based on

geographic region or shared language). Includes personal

experiences of and opinions about these types of

activities.

Multicultural/

Migration Related

Statements about activities in organisation or network

focusing on ethnic/migration issues involving more than

one national, cultural or religious group (not dominated by

the majority ethnicity nor any single minority ethnicity - e.g.

refugee council, immigrant advisory committee, anti-

racism forum). Includes personal experiences of and

opinions about these types of activities.

Civic

Activity

History

Mainstream/

Majority

Statements about activities in mainstream/majority

organisation or network (e.g. political party, trade union,

church and welfare organisations), where the central focus

is not ethnicity or nationality but a specific civic concern.

Includes personal experiences of and opinions about

these types of activities.

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Motivations Statements about motivations for being active, both

individual (e.g. making contacts, gaining experiences,

gaining respect) and collective (e.g. desire to change

society, in response to specific event in country of origin,

in response to specific event in receiving country).

Activation

Process

Demotivations/

Failures

Statements about failed efforts to become active.

Reasons/times when person feels demoralised about their

activity.

Material Statements about practical resources (e.g. time, money,

office space) which enable or inhibit activity.

Social Statements about relationships and social capital which

enable or inhibit activity, (e.g. level of support from family

and friends, social networks outside the immediate family).

Re-

sources &

Personal

Attributes

Personality/ Skills Statements about personal attributes/skills which enable

or inhibit activity (e.g. language, communication,

organisational ability). Includes identity/personality as

reason for becoming active. (e.g. vocation/calling, strong

sense of belonging to one group).

Public Policies Statements about policies and conditions set by public

bodies (e.g. anti-discrimination programmes, subsidies,

local integration initiatives, legal restrictions, exclusionary

policies) which enable or inhibit activity. Also includes

organisations or individuals who have an impact on policy.

Societal

Oppor-

tunity

Structure

Other Societal

Circumstances

Statements about all other external circumstances related

to societal opportunity structure (e.g. size of immigrant

community, openness of local population, sense of

exclusion, implicit racism/discrimination in society) which

enable or inhibit activity.

Policy

Proposals

Response Proposals for policy changes made in response to

reflective question ‘if you were a political leader of this

country…’

Gender

Statements about the role of women in civic activities or

the influence of gender on activism. Includes statements

about the involvement in women’s associations.

Note-

worthy

Quotes

Any statements that are particularly original, eloquent,

evocative…

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Table 4: Interviewee Attributes used in POLITIS database

ATTRIBUTE

TITLE

OPTIONS

Textname

Unique interview ID (number_interviewer name_interviewee

intitals_country residence_country origin) *see bottom of page

Textgroup Country of residence (all EU member states except Luxembourg)

CountryOrigin Multiple: for every nationality included in study

RegionOrigin Africa North, Africa Sub-Sahara, Asia, Eurasia, Middle East, Eastern

Europe, Former USSR, Latin America, North America, EU

Gender Male, Female

Age 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50-59, 60&over

NationalStatus Naturalised, Foreign national with secure/permanent residence permit,

Foreign national with temporary/conditional residence permit,

Undocumented immigrant (foreign national with no residence permit),

Status unknown

ReasonEmig Asylum/Refugee, Marriage/Relationship/Family Reunification, Study,

Work/Economic, Repatriation, Other

YearsStay 5 or less, 6-10, 11-15, 16-20, Over-20

MaritalStatus Single, Married, Separated/Divorced, Widowed, Other

(e.g. Partner, Engaged), Unknown

PartnerNationality Multiple: for every nationality included in study, Not Applicable (N/A),

Unknown

PartnerRegion EU, Non-EU, Not Applicable (N/A), Unknown

Children Yes, No, Unknown

Education High (university/college education, diploma or degree), Medium (high

school certificate, formalised occupational training at technical school),

Low (no school leaving certificate or equivalent, no formalised

occupational training), Housewife, Unknown.

EmploymentStatus Employed, Unemployed, Student, Retired, Unknown

Employed Yes/No

TypeEmployment List professions as stated on template.

PrincipalActivity Brief description of type of activity

SecondActivity As above, plus N/A

Date coded Month/day

Notes Important notes regarding interview

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5.2. Aspect analysis

The idea is that researchers are able to get an overview of quotes concerning their

research question in the full database so that they will be able to identify interviews that

are most promising for their specific question – including contrasting cases - and make

a choice for in depth analysis. As a rule, marked quotes should guide selection and

analysis, but analysis should not be restricted it to this, because quotes should be

analysed with sensitivity to the context, requiring usually that the researcher reads and

understands the full interview to be able to take the context into account.

In-depth analysis of the selected interviews will usually involve another coding round

with more specific codes that are developed by the individual researcher and only

applied to the subset of interviews chosen for closer analysis. However, researchers may

always come back to the full interview sample to test whether specific ideas hold under

other circumstances. Thus, while we are not able to do more interviews in case that new

questions arise during the analysis, we still have a flexible iterative design as we may

approach other interviews in the full interview set with new ideas, a strategy that we call

‘horizontal dissimilarity sampling’.

We are aware that there are different approaches to qualitative data analysis, and that

researchers have learned data analysis with different books in different languages,

following different schools of analysis and national and disciplinary research traditions.

Qualitative contents analysis probably comes closest as a common denominator.

However, we assume that the analysis of different research questions in the POLITIS

context may reflect this variety of backgrounds. As a joint reference point, we chose the

textbook of Rubin and Rubin (Rubin and Rubin 2005), summarised key issues of data

analysis as a recommendation and promotion of communication about methodological

issues. This summary was used at the second summer school (http://www.uni-

oldenburg.de/politis-europe/download/IntroductiondataanalysisinPOLITIS.pdf)

Beyond all differences, all project participants hold that interview transcripts have to be

analysed carefully and systematically with sensitivity to the context. We step ahead by

comparing similar data units within interviews and between interviews, taking

background characteristics of interviewees into account and relating our findings to

relevant literature. We want to make contributions to theory-development and to

recommendations for policy action and education, while weighing carefully whether we

are confident from our data to make generalising statements.

6. Final Remarks

The POLITIS research project investigates an underresearched topic that is nonetheless

important for democratic developments in immigrant receiving societies – the patterns

and processes of civic activities of first generation immigrants with a specific focus on

high level activities. To explore this topic in its European variety, we chose an

innovative strategy to involve students and PhD-researchers from all over the world as

interviewers and discussants.

21

In this paper, the methodological approach and the ideas behind it were presented in

detail. It is partly prospective, meaning that whether everything will work out as we

thought remains to be seen. Working Paper 4 will describe the interview database and

the quality of interviews in more detail, and it will offer observations and impressions

from the first reading of interviews.

Concerning outcomes in terms of numbers of interviews, the result was beyond

expectation. While we hoped to generate 150 interviews (implying a drop-out rate of

one third), we achieved 176 interviews. In addition, the intended side-effects of the

strategy have fully come into effect: There was a substantial training effect for many of

the partipants according to their own statements, and we know of a number of follow-up

initiatives, like writing joint papers, organising events and planning future cooperation

that contribute to the creation of an inclusive European research area.

The research design required substantial organisational input, demanding a high level of

commitment from all members of the team. There were immaterial rewards in this

design, as team members perceived the high degree of interaction in the international

research partnership usually as fruitful and enjoyable in itself. It involved very high

workloads in terms of time and energy in peak times. As far as we can oversee the

functioning of our unusual research design so far, we could well recommend some of its

key elements for replication in further research, particularly the involvement of an

international team of advanced students and PhD-researchers as partners in a qualitative

interview project. However, a somewhat less ambitious scope, both regarding total

numbers and the coverage of all EU countries of study, might be sufficient.

22

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