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• Socio-economic status plays a contrasting role explaining interethnic friendships. • Stronger preferences for cultural similarity leads to fewer interethnic friendships. • Higher perceived opportunities results in more interethnic friendships. • SES negatively relates to opportunities for natives, positively for minorities. • For minority members, opportunities are a mediating mechanism. Interethnic contact is important for social cohesion and has been shown to vary with people's socio-economic status (SES). There is some evidence that SES has opposite effects on interethnic contact for non-Western ethnic minorities and for majority members in Western countries. Whereas minority members with a higher SES tend to have more contact with natives, natives with a higher SES tend to have less inter-ethnic contact. To replicate and further understand these contrasting findings, we focused on interethnic friendships in particular and tested simultaneously for majority and minority members whether preferences for cultural similarity, opportunities to meet ethnic others, and disapproval of third parties, mediate the relationship between SES and having interethnic friendships. Analyses of 368 natives and 267 non-Western ethnic minority members in the Netherlands confirmed the contrasting effects of SES on interethnic friendships for these two groups. Importantly, we found that for minority members higher SES was related to more friendships with natives through more meeting opportunities. For natives, higher SES was related to fewer friendships with ethnic minorities, however, this relationship could not be explained by lower meeting opportunities. Preferences for cultural similarity and third-party disapproval did not explain the link between SES and interethnic friendships for any of the two groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the impact of different modes and tailor-made response enhancing measures (TMREM)—such as bilingual interviewers with a shared ethnic background and translated questionnaires—on the measurement of substantive variables in surveys among minority ethnic groups in the Netherlands. It also provides insight into the ability to detect mode measurement effects of a recently developed method for disentangling mode measurement and mode selection effects, as well as into the tenability of the assumptions underlying this method. The data used in this study come from a large-scale survey design experiment among the four largest non-Western minority ethnic groups in the Netherlands comparing single-mode computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) and sequential computer-assisted web interviewing, computer-assisted telephone interviewing, and CAPI-MM. The number and intensity of the TMREM varied among the four ethnic groups. The results show that mode measurement effects occur among all ethnic groups and are the result of a combination of the presence or absence of an interviewer and TMREM. Mode measurement effects occur more often on sociocultural questions, but also, on occasion, on more sociostructural or background questions. The method used to disentangle mode measurement and mode selection effects can be applied to detect mode measurement effects, but one should be cautious in interpreting them. Implausible mode measurement effects can be caused by the violation of the assumptions underlying this method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates the impact of survey design choices on the representativity and nonresponse of eight sub-surveys conducted among non-Western minorities in The Netherlands. The surveys were part of a repeated, cross-sectional measurement conducted separately among each of the four largest non-Western minority groups. This study utilizes fieldwork outcomes in conjunction with the R-indicator and maximal absolute standardized bias to show the impact of survey design choices - such as the period and length of fieldwork, the use of bilingual interviewers, the number of face-to-face call attempts and a re-issue of nonresponding sampled persons - on the potential nonresponse bias. Partial R-indicators are used to detect which socio-demographic subgroups contribute the most to a nonrepresentative response, conditional on ethnic group and survey design. The results indicate that long fieldwork periods increase the potential for nonresponse bias among non-Western minorities due to moving and that the timing of fieldwork has an impact on the number of sampled persons who are unavailable during the fieldwork period. Furthermore, the use of bilingual interviewers is necessary to conduct a survey among Turkish and Moroccans due to language problems; otherwise the potential for nonresponse bias can be quite severe. Also, the use of a re-issue phase reduces the potential for nonresponse bias in surveys among non-Western minorities in The Netherlands. Finally, partial R-indicator analyses provide further insight on how future surveys can be improved in order to reduce the potential for nonresponse bias among each of the four non-Western minority groups. Editor Note: The originally published version of this article has been replaced by a corrected version on 13/02/2015. The corrections concerned two numbers in Table 2.