Innovative Methods for Obtaining Survey Data from Migrants

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This is a proposal for an exploratory/developmental research grant (R21) to create and evaluate new and innovative procedures for collecting data from families and households in one area and linking that information to individuals and families who have migrated from that area to other places around the world. This research is motivated by the many limitations placed on past migration research by the inability of researchers to obtain and link information about migrants and their destination communities with information about their origin communities and those who do not move. The inability to link origin communities, stayers, and migrants is also a threat to the validity of projects that focus on other topics such as family, marriage, fertility, and health. This study will take advantage of important innovations in international communication technology-such as cell phones and the internet--to create new ways to interview migrants at destinations around the world, to follow the migrants over time, and to link them to their origin communities. This study will build upon a long-term project in Nepal that has been collecting information about communities, households, and individuals from 1996 to the present. This parent project in Nepal has a sample of movers and stayers in a representative sample of neighborhoods in Nepal. The parent project interviewed people living in these neighborhoods in 2008, and the proposed project will interview those who had moved out of the neighborhoods. We will locate and interview the movers, both in Nepal and elsewhere in the world. This will constitute a significant advance in methods by including in the same data set both stayers and movers from a neighborhood. We plan to utilize a wide range of innovative methods to interview a very large percentage of all migrants from these neighborhoods and households. We will create the procedures and instruments for our research, tailoring them to fit the circumstances of the individual migrants and their specific destination locations. We will evaluate the success of our data collection, with special attention paid to response rates and the quality of the data collected. We will also evaluate differentials in our success across the migrant destinations and across their personal attributes and the characteristics of their origin households and neighborhoods. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This project will take advantage of important innovations in international communication technology and the widespread and increasing availability of cell phones and the internet to interview migrants at destinations anywhere in the world and to follow them over time. Migration is influenced by health and has important implications for the health of both those who choose to migrate and those who choose to remain in the origin communities. This project will permit better understanding of all of these health-related factors.