- Selecting Communities
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- The process of selecting communities for the Mexican Migration has traditionally relied on
- anthropological methods. Communities are chosen after a personal reconnaissance of the
- geographic area to be studied by the principal investigators. Because the project initially
- focused on Western Mexico, the traditional heartland for migration to the United States,
- practically all of the earliest communities had significant indices of out-migration, which
- could easily be detected using field interviews and simple observations of the frequency of
- new homes, foreign license plates, currency exchanges, and international courier services.
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- Until 2000, we lacked access to a valid measure to indicate the intensity of emigration
- from specific municipalities and the only measure indicating migration was the sex ratio.
- The only demographic fact regularly considered was the community's sex ratio, which offer
- general picture of the intensity of the process of international migration because in
- Mexico emigration is so heavily male. After an initial round of fieldwork, investigators
- compared their preliminary data with census statistics and formation available from
- bibliographic sources. However, the MMP has never explicitly sought to survey only
- communities with high rates of out-migration. Investigators simply seek to corroborate
- that there is some migration from the community in question before proceeding. Then they
- select four specific locations to represent each of four levels of urbanization:
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fewer than 2,500 inhabitants
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2,500 to 10,000 inhabitants
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10,000 to 100,000 inhabitants
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- usually a particular neighborhood within in a state's capital city
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- In the pueblos and ranchos, investigators conduct a complete census of dwellings and
- undertake random selection from the resulting list. In mid-sized cities and urban
- metropolises, investigators generally chose a traditional, well-established neighborhood–one
- not dominated by recent rural-urban migrants. As a result, the urban samples are in reality
- samples of urban neighborhoods or specifically demarcated quarters. In all cases, the
- neighborhood must have at least 1,200 enumerated dwellings, from which a random sample of
- 200 is taken.
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- The methodology of the MMP thus yields results with a high degree of representativeness at
- the community level, and in some of the smaller pueblos and ranchos investigators have been
- able to survey every household in the community. Given that the sample is not targeted to
- migrants per se, but surveys the community as a whole, the project needs a fairly large
- sample size to generate a significant number of migrants. Traditional methods of cluster
- sampling generally survey small numbers of respondents across a large number of areas, but
- this generally yields small numbers of migrants to study an inability to make
- generalizations at the community level. For example, rather than interviewing 20 households
- in five communities we interview 100 households in one community, thereby enabling us to
- make generalizations about migratory processes at the community level. If the frequency of
- migration is 30%, on average the surveys would contain only six migrants in each of the five
- communities, rather than 30 migrants in one community.
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- At present we are able to draw upon an index of migratory developed for municipalities in
- Mexico’s National Population Council (CONAPO) based on the 2000 and 2010 census. This index
- provides reliable information about the level of U.S. migration prevailing at the municipal
- level and is particularly useful in identifying new communities of origin for migrants in
- new sending states, where heretofore little information has been available. In sum, after 25
- years of field experience, the MMP continues to use anthropological criteria for selecting
- communities, which are then corroborated with available data from the census and other
- sources to confirm the existence of migrants before making the final selection.
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- Ethnosurvey
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- The Ethnosurvey is eclectic and draws on methods and approaches well-known in sociology,
- anthropology, psychology, and education. Its contribution and complexity lies in the way all
- these methods are combined within a single study. The main idea for the Ethnosurvey is “to
- complement qualitative and quantitative procedures, so one's weakenesses become the other's
- strength, yielding a body of data with greater reliability and more internal validity than
- is possible to achieve using either method alone.” (Massey 1987).
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- The Ethnosurvey contains a series of tables that are organized around a particular topic,
- giving coherence to the “conversation”. It follows a semi structured format to generate an
- interview schedule that is flexible, unobtrusive and non-threatening. It requires that
- identical information be obtained for each person, but questions, wording and ordering are
- not fixed. The precise phrasing and timing of each query is left to the judgment of the
- interviewer, depending on circumstances.
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- In addition, the Ethnosurvey is explicitly designed to provide quantitative data for
- multi-level analysis by compiling data at the individual, household, and community levels.
- Detailed community-level data are compiled at the time of the survey by the fieldwork
- supervisor; these data are of great help to interpret the socioeconomic context within which
- individuals and households interact (Massey 1987). This small questionnaire is referred to
- as the Community Data Inventory.
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- Interview Process
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- The questionnaires are applied in three phases. In the first phase, basic social and
- demographic data are collected from all members of the household. The interview begins by
- identifying the household head and systematically enumerating the spouse and children,
- beginning with the oldest. All children of the head are listed on the questionnaire whether
- or not they live at home, but if a son or daughter is a member of another household, this
- fact is recorded. A child is considered to be living in a separate household if he or she is
- married, maintains a separate house or kitchen, and organizes expenses separately. After
- listing the head, spouse, and children, other household members are identified and their
- relationship to the head clarified.
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Phase 1
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- A particularly important task in the first phase of the questionnaire is the
- identification of people with prior migrant experience in either the United States or
- Mexico. For those individuals with migrant experience the interviewer records the total
- number of U.S. trips, as well as information about the first and most recent U.S. trips,
- including the year, duration, destination, U.S. occupation, legal status, and hourly
- wage. This exercise is then repeated for first and most recent migrations within Mexico.
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Phase 2
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- The second phase of the ethnosurvey questionnaire compiles a year-by-year life history
- for all household heads, including a childbearing history, a property history, a housing
- history, a business history, and a labor history. The goal of this phase is to capture
- occupational mobility, health status, migration history, and family formation.
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Phase 3
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- The third and final phase of the questionnaire gathers information about the household
- head's experiences on his or her most recent trip to the United States, including the
- mode of border-crossing, the kind and number of accompanying relatives, the kind and
- number of relatives already present in the United States, the number of social ties that
- had been formed with U.S. citizens, English language ability, job characteristics, and
- use of U.S. social services.
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Data Coding/Weights
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Data Coding and File Construction
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- After the ethnosurvey questionnaires are completed and revised, data are entered in
- Mexico. The entry programs perform initial screening, range checks, and simple tests for
- logical consistency. The preliminary files are then transferred to Princeton University,
- where additional data cleaning is performed, numeric codes are assigned to occupations and
- places, and the final data sets are assembled into six primary data files, each providing
- a unique perspective of Mexican migrants, their families, and their experiences. SIX
- primary files have been created, each corresponding to a different unit of analysis: PERS,
- MIG, MIGOTHER, HOUSE, LIFE and SPOUSE. Data at the community level have been compiled in
- the file: COMMUN.
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Weights
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- The MMP database provides community- and sample-specific weights. For each community, you
- will see a single weight for all the households in the home country sample and another
- weight for all the households in the US sample.
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- When working with pooled data from multiple communities, these weights give you the option
- to adjust your estimates in order to take into account the relative sizes of all the
- sampling frames. Whether you will need to weight your estimates or not will depend on what
- your goal is.
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