Suchergebnisse

This case provides a rationale for the use of convenience samples when surveying minority populations. It is based on a comparative study of the effects of social policies on the political participation of immigrants. It discusses the opportunities and challenges related to a 2-year data collection effort with immigrants from India and El Salvador in the Greater Toronto Area (Canada) and Santa Clara County (United States), for which no sampling frames were available and which included a survey study administered through face-to-face interviews with 525 respondents. I explain how my research design combined a most-similar systems and a survey design. Drawing from a variety of challenges that occurred in the recruitment and retention of survey respondents, I explain why random and representative samples, which represent the golden standard of survey research, might result in consequential selection biases when working with minority populations. I describe the advantages of convenience samples, also in comparison to other designs that have been applied in the literature, such as semi-structured elite interviews. I argue that research designs that involve minority populations make it clear that data-generation processes are forms of social interactions that are regulated by trust and save fac?? dynamics such as those that characterize all other forms of social relations. Acknowledging such dynamics, as convenience samples make possible, allows for the inclusion of research respondents that would most likely be excluded from other kinds of research designs.

This paper argues that both socio-economic disadvantage and political factors, such as the West's foreign policy with regard to the Muslim world, along with historical grievances, play a part in the development of Islamic radicalized collective action in Western Europe. We emphasise the role of group identity based individual behaviour in organising collective action within radicalized Muslim groups. Inasmuch as culture plays any role at all in radicalization, it is because individuals feel an imperative to act on the basis of their Muslim identity, something to which different individuals will attach varying degrees of salience, depending on how they place their Muslim identity based actions in the scheme of their multiple identities. We also emphasize the role of the opportunistic politician, from the majority European community, in fomenting hatred for Muslims, which also produces a backlash from radicalized political Islam. We present comparative evidence on socio-economic, political and cultural disadvantage faced by Muslim minorities in five West European countries: Germany, the UK, France, Spain and the Netherlands.

"In Europa nimmt die Sorge vor dem home-grown terrorism zu. Die Radikalisierung vollzieht sich nicht in einem sozioökonomischen und politischen Vakuum. Auch internationale Konflikte dienen zur Rechtfertigung des Jihad." (Autorenreferat)