During the last two decades the Netherlands institute for Social Research has accumulated a lot of knowledge and experience in conducting surveys among non-western ethnic minorities in the Netherlands. So far these surveys have always been unimode face-to-face surveys, but for the 2010 survey (SIM2010) an experiment has been set up to compare this design with a sequential mixed-mode survey.

This experiment has several advantages such as the possibility to separate differences due to changes over time and differences due to changes in design on important outcome variables. This is an important issue since this survey is part of a time series. Another advantage is the possibility to investigate how representative the response compositions of both surveys are. Of course this design has some limitations and the most obvious one is that in this design the mixed-mode survey makes it very difficult to disentangle mode effects from selection effects.

This presentation discusses the possibilities and limitations of conducting a mixed-mode survey in comparison with a unimode face-to-face survey among non-western minorities in the Netherlands. It focuses on issues such as questionnaire design, mode choice and fieldwork logistics. Furthermore it talks about differences in response and response composition in both surveys and differences on important outcome variables.