Attitudes Towards Immigration: Proposal for the Questions to Include in the ActEU Survey

The aim of this paper is to select three variables that capture attitudes towards immigration for the design of the ActEU project survey. In order to have the best empirical basis and methodological rigour, we have created a database with all questions on immigration that are present in the main dat...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: López-Yagüe, Alberto, Morales Diez de Ulzurrun, Laura
Tipo de recurso: otro
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2023
País:España
Institución:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Repositorio:DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
OAI Identifier:oai:dnet:digitalcsic_::087d6f1d8bfb636a7baeb0fd11d528ba
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/428862
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Attitudes to immigration
Survey methodology
Immigration
Descripción
Sumario:The aim of this paper is to select three variables that capture attitudes towards immigration for the design of the ActEU project survey. In order to have the best empirical basis and methodological rigour, we have created a database with all questions on immigration that are present in the main data sources. In total, 1,776 variables were considered. The strategy implemented is funnel-shaped. First, we have selected the 15-20 survey items that are most present in the surveys and in the most countries since the 2000s. Ideally, we want survey items that have at least one multi-country wave for the early 2000s, late 2000s, early 2010s, late 2010s and early 2020s and that cover most of the 10 EU countries that we focus on in the ActEU project: Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, and Spain. Second, once these initial items have been selected, we conduct a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to analyse which items load with other questions on attitudes towards immigration in one of the waves in which each of them was present with more other items on immigration. Finally, with the selection of these 5-10 indicators from the previous step, we perform some correlation analyses with trust/confidence in politicians, the government/executive, parliament, as well as indicators of legitimacy of democracy/satisfaction with democracy/political alienation. In this way, we obtain three indicators that provide a good measure of the different dimensions of attitudes towards immigration and maximise the correlations with political trust. Moreover, since there are differences between countries in attitudes towards immigration and each indicator can be interpreted differently depending on the national and cultural context, the second and third steps have also been carried out individually for each ActEU country.