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 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 been expanded into a Federal Government/Federal State Barometer, which enables analyses to be made at the federal state level too. The 16th Conference of Integration Ministers, held in April 2021, endorsed the Federal Government and federal states continuing to jointly fund the Integration Barometer. The next Barometer, planned for 2022, can thus also be based on a significantly increased sample.
One unique feature of the Barometer is that it captures the perspectives and assessments of both sides of the immigration society. It therefore complements those statistics that only look at either the majority population or the immigrant population. One of the strengths of the Integration Barometer is the large number of respondents with a migration background, making it one of the largest representative immigrant surveys in Germany. Its large sample enables detailed analyses among the population with a migration background, for example by group of origin or social status. Weighting factors applied during the analyses guarantee that the actual shares of people with and without a migration background in the population are appropriately reflected. This ensures that the overall analysis is representative.
For the Integration Barometer, people are randomly selected every two years based on a scientific procedure and then interviewed by telephone. More than 9,000 people were surveyed for the 2018 Integration Barometer. The sample for the 2020 Federal Government/Federal State Integration Barometer was significantly expanded (15,000 intervieews) so that analyses can also be conducted at the level of the federal states. The 2011 and 2013 Annual Reports encompassed a smaller-scale migration barometer which looked at migration policy issues.
