University of Krems Press Surveying irregular migrants: Challenges and approaches eng Surveying irregular migrants hard-to-count-population sampling methods Legal status trajectories Data challenges Mixed methods Text book part application/pdf Rocco Molinari Livia Elisa Ortensi 2025-09-30 doi:10.48341/g31s-vq79-10 Testo Capitolo di libro Key points • Irregular migrants are difficult to capture in statistics because of their absence from official sampling frames, mobility, and fear of detection. Surveying them requires tailored approaches, including non-probability sampling, trust-building strategies and ethical safeguards. • This chapter reviews three types of surveys that can yield data on irregular migrants: those that explicitly include them in the sampling design, those that target applicants of regularisation programmes, and retrospective surveys that reconstruct past legal trajectories. • Drawing on examples from France, Italy, Spain and the United States, this chapter shows how innovative designs and context-specific adaptations can improve coverage and data quality. • Each approach has its own strengths and limitations. A combination of methods, applied thoughtfully, is needed to strengthen the evidence base and support more accurate data collection and analysis. Text Buchkapitel http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ https://door.donau-uni.ac.at/o:5692