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Due to the increasing refugees’ movements over the world and the increasing influx of refugees into Western countries (especially Europe), many studies on refugees have been conducted or started.

These studies range from narrow topics on specific groups and/or their situations at specific times or places, their motivations or reasons to flee their countries, to large-scale surveys that are either newly started or that try to integrate refugee populations into their existing samples.

Studies on refugees face special problems due to the specific (legal, economic, social, medical etc.) conditions refugees are living in, e.g. conducting interviews in crowded places like group accommodations, ethical challenges of the researcher as a non-intervening observer, misunderstandings of the aims of the researchers to the interviewed refugee. But for all that it is crucial to interview refugees adequately, if one aims to gain meaningful results.
Therefore, in this session, we want to discuss possible solutions or research strategies that were applied to deal with these special conditions and challenges of studies on refugees. We are especially interested in experiences made by applying these strategies, so that researchers can learn from each others' trails and errors during their work with/on refugees. This session concentrates on solutions that can be implemented in or transferred to quantitative-empirical studies.

We invite contributions from researchers who report how they dealt with specific problems and how these survey technics worked in practice. Possible thematic foci can be:

- Translation and multi-language-instruments
- Handling of left- vs. right-aligned languages (e.g. in the presentation to the interviewee)
- Questioning illiterate persons (e.g. audio-supported interviewing)
- Interviewer effects (e.g.: cultural challenges due to the gender of interviewer and interviewee; native speaking vs. non-native speaking interviewers)
- Conducting interviews in group accommodations
- High mobility (e.g. use of special communication channels like social media)
- Social desirability
- Construct validity (e.g. cultural differences, systematic response bias, established scales vs. simple language items)
- Consideration of traumatic experiences and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

Furthermore, we appreciate contributions, which analyze, how different survey techniques may influence research results.