Immigrants often show particularly low response rates. Consequently, they are under-represented and object to
response bias. Since many surveys lack comprehensive information on non-participants in general and on their
immigration background in particular, detailed analyses of immigrant non-response are still scarce.
Here, data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) in Germany offer a promising chance for more
detailed analyses. Among others, NEPS provides a school-based sample of German 9th-graders. In addition to
PAPI assessments of students, teachers and headmasters CATI interviews with parents were conducted.
However, for 44.2 percent of the participating students parental interviews could not be realized. While this
generally is an undesirable fact, it allows us to analyze parental non-response using data gathered from students
and schools as contextual information to predict parental cooperation and response. Thereby, we seek to identify
more precisely how non-participating immigrant parents are characterized.
To this end, I apply logistic random intercept models to estimate probabilities of cooperation and probabilities of
non-response for immigrant parents from Poland, Turkey, the former Soviet Union, former Yugoslavia and
Southern Europe. With 42.8 percent the overall response rate of immigrant parents is 17 percentage points lower
than for native parents. Furthermore, cooperation and response rates differ strongly between immigrant groups.
Context information like seniority of interviewers, students’ language skills, parental education, school resources
and school composition are used to explain initial differences. However, even controlling for all these aspects
substantive net effects of “country-of-origin” remain. In line with theoretical considerations and earlier research,
language proficiency turns out to be the single most important factor for parental response. Results may help to
tailor future studies to better meet the particular requirements of immigrants and thus to reduce response bias.
