New open access article: Surveying Emigrants Worldwide – Using Facebook and Instagram to Recruit Respondents in Cross-National (E)Migration Research

The article Surveying Emigrants Worldwide – Using Facebook and Instagram to Recruit Respondents in Cross-National (E)Migration Research has just been published in Comparative Migration Studies. 

In this piece, Bernd Weiß and I demonstrate that global survey sampling via Meta’s advertising platform can be an effective and low-cost method for reaching hard-to-access populations—such as emigrants. With a modest budget, we surveyed nearly 4,000 Germans who had moved to 148 countries and territories. 

Germany is somewhat unique in that it maintains an official register that enables probability-based sampling of citizens who report their emigration to the authorities. This infrastructure offers a rare benchmark for evaluating alternative sampling strategies. While acknowledging the analytical limitations of non-probability sampling, our study shows that Meta-based recruitment yielded high participation—including in regions where the register-based approach struggled to do so—and reached many emigrants who would otherwise have been missed entirely. 

Even beyond (e)migration research, our findings may be valuable to scholars seeking to conduct global surveys in the absence of a sampling frame or aiming to combine sampling techniques to offset each method’s limitations. 

Full citation:
Pötzschke, S., & Weiß, B. (2025). Surveying emigrants worldwide – using Facebook and Instagram to recruit respondents in cross-national (e)migration research. Comparative Migration Studies, 13(56). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-025-00464-w