Sampling Minoritised Populations: Experiences from the Evidence for Equality National Survey on the Impact of COVID-19 on Ethnic and Religious Minority Groups in Britain

Abstract

The rapid improvements in our ability to conduct fast and cost-effective online surveys, together with advances in statistical theory to adjust for selection biases in nonprobability sampling, has led to opportunities to consider alternative sampling approaches for hard-to-capture minoritised populations. In this paper, we present an application of a carefully designed nonprobability online web survey to capture the experiences of ethnic and religious minority groups in Britain of the Covid-19 pandemic. The survey, The Evidence for Equality National Survey (EVENS), was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the United Kingdom and implemented by the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) and Ipsos (a Survey Organisation). We describe here the robust design of EVENS, the data collection monitoring using quotas and facilitated by a responsive survey design framework including estimating Representativity (R-) Indicators. We also discuss the survey adjustment weighting approach that we followed to mitigate for selection biases. We conclude with lessons learnt and further recommendations for sampling minoritised populations.