Welcome to my website. I am a tenured senior researcher at GESIS – Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences in Mannheim (Germany), where I am part, and deputy head, of the GESIS Panel team. Furthermore, I am a project consultant in survey methodology, focusing on online surveys and survey sampling through social networking sites.

Since 2018, I am also a corresponding member of the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS, University of Osnabrück, Germany).

I hold a master’s degree in International Migration and Intercultural Relations and a doctoral degree (Dr. phil.) from the University of Osnabrück.

I have been a visiting researcher at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario (Canada, 2022) and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock (Germany, 2019).

Since early 2024, I serve as co-chair of the IMISCOE Standing Committee Methodological Approaches and Tools in Migration Research, which I founded in 2019 together with great colleagues.

My research interests include survey methodology, migration research methods, voluntary and forced migration, mobility, and transnationalism.

Many of my recent and ongoing research endeavors investigate the possibility of using social networking sites, Facebook and Instagram in particular, to survey otherwise hard-to-reach populations.

Now available in open access:

Migration Research in a Digitized World: Using Innovative Technology to Tackle Methodological Challenges

This open access book explores implications of the digital revolution for migration scholars’ methodological toolkit. New information and communication technologies hold considerable potential to improve the quality of migration research by originating previously non-viable solutions to a myriad of methodological challenges in this field of study. Combining cutting-edge migration scholarship and methodological expertise, the book addresses a range of crucial issues related to both researcher-designed data collections and the secondary use of “big data”, highlighting opportunities as well as challenges and limitations. A valuable source for students and scholars engaged in migration research, the book will also be of keen interest to policymakers.

Pötzschke, S., & Rinken, S. (Eds.). (2022). Migration Research in a Digitized World: Using Innovative Technology to Tackle Methodological Challenges. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-01319-5

News

Out now: Cultural Identity Development in Adult Forced Migrants – The Psychometrics of a Measure in Arabic, Spanish, and Ukrainian

I’m pleased to share a new publication in the International Journal of Intercultural Relations, co-authored with Débora B. Maehler, Nivedita Bhaktha, and Howard Ramos: “Cultural Identity Development in Adult Forced Migrants: The Psychometrics of a Measure in Arabic, Spanish, and…

New open access publication: Guideline on the use of Meta’s SNS for survey recruitment, including a flowchart template to facilitate reporting

GESIS has published our new paper “A Guideline on Recruiting Online Survey Respondents through Facebook and Instagram: A Case Study of Hard-to-Access Health Workers.”. This survey guideline is meant as explores the vast potential of social networking sites (SNS), with…