ESRA 2027 sessions by theme

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Session Details

European societies are becoming increasingly diverse, which has implications for social cohesion and intergroup relations. This concerns relations between the ethnic majority and minorities as well as between different ethnic or religious minority groups. At the same time, the data landscape is broadening. For example, large-scale surveys are increasingly linked to register and other administrative data, web scraping opens up digital trace data such as social media content, and geocoding enables analyzing local context effects. These developments open new possibilities while raising new questions about validity, representativeness, and inference. This is particularly the case for migrant and minority populations, which are often hard to reach. Much research on immigrant groups draws on general population surveys not designed with these populations in mind, and typically lacking bilingual interviewers and translated materials, which can lead to selective migrant samples.

This session invites both methodological and applied research on how ethnic minority as well as majority populations perceive and relate to one another. On the data collection and measurement side, this includes work on research design, sampling, and recruiting respondents from immigrant groups to study social cohesion, the linkage of survey data with other data sources, and computational approaches such as natural language processing, LLMs, and machine learning. On the substantive side, this includes studies on minority political attitudes and trust, identities and belonging, ethnic prejudice and discrimination, integration processes, or the political communication of intergroup relations.

By bringing together methodologists and substantive researchers, the session aims to connect how we collect and measure phenomena at the intersection of migration and social cohesion with how we analyze them to answer concrete research questions.