Sampling of migrants in cross-national survey research is challenging. Established techniques such as random-route sampling or random-digit-dialing are associated with high monetary costs, in particular when small migrant groups are targeted. The use of onomastic (name based) telephone sampling is a relatively cost-efficient alternative, but it relies on a number of conditions (e.g., existence of telephone directories in the respective countries and inclusion of the target population). As the use of social networking sites (SNSs) has spread around the globe in the last 20 years, the present paper investigates whether a specific SNS, Facebook, can be used to sample migrants, with the ultimate goal to supplement other approaches. This article is based on data collected as part of a survey that used Facebook advertisements to sample Polish migrants in Austria, Ireland, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The study succeeded in sampling a total of 1,103 individuals who completed the relatively extensive questionnaire within the field period of 8 weeks (1,100 within the 4 weeks the advertisements were placed). In contrast to most of the few other studies that tried to sample respondents with the help of Facebook advertisements, no incentives were used. With nearly all (96%) of the respondents belonging to the target population and a total sampling budget of €500 (US$557), the method can be considered both accurate and cost efficient in recruiting people from the target population. Furthermore, our results suggest that the vast majority of the sample would not have been reached if onomastic sampling had been employed.

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees reports that more than half of the 65 million refugees and displaced people identified worldwide are under the age of 18. For this reason, researchers, practitioners and policymakers need to understand the consequences of forced migration on the integration of refugee children and youth in receiving countries. A first step to do that is to scope out the state of current research on these issues and identify possible gaps. To that end, the article offers a scoping review of peer-reviewed English and German academic articles on refugee children and youth’s integration over a 20-year period. The review finds: little consensus on the definitions of ‘children’ or ‘youth’; most studies focus on girls and boys that are between 12 and 19 years old; there is a focus on refugees landing in developed countries; and there is a lack of longitudinal and quantitative studies.

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Research on international migrants has seen a sharp increase during the last decades, yet sampling them remains a major challenge, especially in a cross-national setting and on a global scale. While various sampling methods are established in the field, most of them cannot easily be implemented globally due to their dependence on specific administrative or infrastructure elements or simply their costs. Since Social Networking Sites (SNS) operate on a global scale, they provide a sampling frame that can be utilized for the targeted recruitment of migrants worldwide. Increasingly used for research purposes and among the largest and most popular SNSs are Facebook and Instagram. In our project GEOOS (German Emigrants Overseas Online Survey), we utilize paid advertisements on these networks to target German emigrants, particularly Germans living outside of Europe. Our research aims to ascertain whether such ads could be used to recruit a nonprobability (migrant) sample on a global scale. More specifically, we are interested in the success of this approach concerning three performance indicators: Cost efficiency, coverage, and sample size. Our advertisement campaign ran for 18 days and resulted in total costs of about 2,223 Euro. This investment led a total of 3,895 individuals to complete the survey; of those, 98 percent belonged to the target population, meaning they were (a) either born in Germany or held German citizenship and (b) did not live in Germany. GEOOS participants lived in a total of 148 countries and territories around the globe. Similar to findings reported in previous studies on this target population, the largest sub-groups resided in predominantly Anglo-phone countries; however, taken together, participants in these countries only constitute 38 percent of our overall sample, with nearly a quarter of GEOOS participants (n = 867) living in Middle and South America, 862 residing in Asian countries, and 476 in Africa. Furthermore, a considerable share of our sample is constituted by individuals who would either not have been included in a sampling frame based on German population registers or who would have been unlikely to be reached through this method due to incomplete or outdated information.