Interviewing Muslims: What Role Does the Origin of the Interviewer Play in Face-to-Face Interviews?

For various reasons, Muslims in Germany are not an easy subpopulation to interview. One reason for the relatively low willingness to participate can be found in general reservations about or an unfamiliarity with social science surveys. Experiences of discrimination and a lack of German language skills can also be an obstacle for this group, which is made up of many new immigrants.

In our article, we present the design of the study Muslim Life in Germany 2020 as a best practice example for generating reliable data on Muslims. As part of the study, more than 4,500 face-to-face interviews were conducted with immigrants and their descendants from 23 Muslim-majority countries, including 3,472 Muslims. In view of the aforementioned hurdles when interviewing Muslims in Germany, additional Syrian interviewers were sent into the field. Hence, we use this data for bivariate and multivariate analyses to examine the extent to which the use of these Arabic-speaking interviewers influenced the results of the survey. 43% of the interviews with Muslims were conducted by Arabic-speaking interviewers. With regard to the investigation of interviewer effects, we focus on the following topics:

• We examine whether Syrian interviewers achieve a different participation rate than interviewers without a migration background. We further analyse whether there are differences between the groups of people that could be reached in terms of socio-demographic characteristics. For example, language barriers should be eliminated for Arabic-speaking target persons and they might have easier access to people from Muslim-majority countries due to similar migration biographical backgrounds.
• We investigate whether differences in the response behaviour of Muslim interviewees to culturally sensitive questions on religion and social cohesion exist in association with the origin of the interviewer that might suggest social desirability effects.