Muslim Life in Germany - Deutsche Islam Konferenz

42 Introduction
All in all in methodological research the premise of a
high response rate as a quality characteristic of a survey is being
increasingly put into perspective. Rather, it is stressed that it is
more important whether respondents and non-respondents
differ systematically from one another. According to recent
research results, refusals to participate are not regarded as
particularly problematic because they are largely situationdependent
and there are only weak correlations between
refusal to participate and background variables (Schnauber/
Daschmann 2008: 120, Schnell 2008: 13). The group of persons
who are not contactable are regarded as problematic in terms
of distorting the content as studies have shown that this group
differs systematically from the group of respondents in terms
of various relevant characteristics. Depending on whether the
slightly ambiguous category “No appointment with target person
possible” is included or not, the percentage of those who
could not be contacted in the adjusted gross sample of the MGL
project is between 13 and 16 per cent. If it is assumed that there
are also neutral losses among the group of non-contactable
persons as no person in the target group lives in the household
concerned, then the actual percentage will be somewhat lower
than reported here. It was not possible to conduct an interview
with 8 per cent of the households contacted even though the
questionnaire was translated into eight languages (see following
sections in this chapter). This is due to the large number of
countries of origin considered in the study it was not possible
to translate the questionnaire into all languages, such as rarely
spoken languages of small population groups in these countries,
and to find interviewers with the appropriate language
skills. The findings also illustrate the extreme importance of
translations in surveys of migrants.