Specificity versus Representativeness: Methodological Approaches to the Study of Mexico-US Migration

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a significant shift in data collection methods in the social sciences, partly as a result of the growing rapprochement between the various disciplines. Despite this trend, certain methodological obstacles are impossible to ignore. One of these is linked to the design of studies that will produce results with a great deal of depth and validity, which are also representative. Analytical depth is usually achieved at the expense of generalizability and vice versa. This article compares two sources of data on Mexico-US migration, based on radically different methodologies: the Mexican Migration Project (Promig) and the National Survey of Population Dynamics (Enadid). Over the years, Promig has produced a vast quantity of historical, contextual, institutional, familial and individual data on international migration in over forty communities. Enadid is a traditional, cross-sectional survey that collects survey on demographic change at a national and state level. Whereas Enadid permits the analysis of certain variables with a great deal of representativeness, Promig provides a deeper and fuller understanding of international migration as a social process. This comparative study shows that a micro-social design drawing on multiple community samples, such as Promig, can solve the methodological conflict between specificity and representativeness. Neither descriptive statistics of the population of Mexican labor migrants nor multivariate analyses of the propensity to emigrate in search of work reveal significant biases in Promig data compared with those of Enadid. Although Promig data cannot be said to be absolutely representative of all Mexican migrants to the United States, even those from traditional sending regions, studies based on this data have a high degree of generalizability. The authors' research also highlights the problem of selectivity and specificity entailed by traditional surveys such as Enadid as a result of restricting their samples to international residents in Mexico and attempting to explain such a complex, socioeconomic process using a limited number of variables.