About the Integration Barometer

The Integration Barometer is a representative public survey of people with and without a migration background in Germany. It measures the integration climate in Germany as an immigration country and captures the population’s perceptions and expectations with regard to integration and migration as well as integration and migration policy. The SVR’s 2020 Integration Barometer was the first to be sponsored jointly by the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community and the 16 federal states (Laender). The Integration Barometer has thus been expanded into a Federal Government/Federal State Barometer, which enables analyses at the level of all federal states. In April 2023, the 18th Conference of Integration Ministers voted in favour of continuing the Federal Government and federal state funding of the Integration Barometer. As a result, the 2024 Integration Barometer could also be implemented with a significantly increased sample.

A unique feature of the Integration Barometer is that it captures the views and assessments of both sides of the immigration society. It therefore complements statistics that only look at the majority population or only the immigrant population. One of its strengths is the high number of respondents with a migration background. The Integration Barometer is one of the largest representative surveys of immigrants in Germany. The large sample enables detailed analyses within the population with a migration background, e.g., by group of origin or social status. Weighting factors are used in the analysis to ensure that the actual population proportions of people with and without a migration background are reflected accordingly. This ensures a representative overall evaluation.

For the Integration Barometer, people are randomly selected every two years using a scientific procedure and surveyed by telephone. Over 15,000 people were surveyed for the Integration Barometer 2024. A Migration Barometer on migration policy issues was conducted to a lesser extent for the 2011 and 2013 Annual Reports.

Data access

In line with good scientific practice (DFG guidelines on the handling of research data), the data from the SVR’s Integration Barometer are generally made available to interested researchers at RWI – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research approximately six months after the SVR’s initial publication (data provided by the Ruhr Research Data Centre at RWI). The data from the SVR’s Integration Barometer 2024 is expected to be available from the RWI from spring 2025.