Reconstructing trends in international migration with three questions in household surveys: Lessons from the MAFE project

The general objectives of this paper are: to show how trends in international migration can be reconstructed with three questions in a household survey; to evaluate the precision of the estimates; and to test how sensitive the estimates are to several methodological choices and assumptions. Migration trends are reconstructed with event history models. The reconstruction uses data collected through migration surveys conducted in cities in three countries as part of the Migration between Africa and Europe project. Specifically, two types of data are used: simple data on the first migration of children of household heads, collected through household surveys, and full migration histories of children collected in biographic surveys. First, the authors evaluate the precision of our estimates using data collected in the household questionnaire. Next, the sensitivity of our results to different methodological choices and assumptions is evaluated. Estimates using household data may be affected by large confidence intervals, and migrations trends are influenced by the simplifying assumptions that are made when using these data.