Attitudes of Latvian residents towards immigration and immigrants

The data set is based on a representative survey of the Latvia’s residents (N=5,803), conducted in June 2021 by using Computer Assisted Web Interviews.

The survey was administred by the market research company Norstat Latvija and  contained two parts. In the beginning, all respondents were asked general questions about immigration, identity, and political behaviour. This part of the survey outlines the sociocultural context of immigration in Latvia. It is followed by an experimental section where every respondent was randomly assigned to either control group or one of five treatment groups. Respondents in treatment groups were exposed to textual vignettes emphasizing different aspects of immigration: (1) economic, (2) return migration, (3) multiculturalism, (4) assimilation, (5) humanitarian. The control group maintained neutral conditions as it was not exposed to any of vignettes. After the vignette treatment, respondents were asked identical questions about their attitudes towards migrants both in general and from specific countries, as well as about the preferred future immigration policy in Latvia. The experimental design of this study yields deeper insights into how various immigration frames can condition and differentiate a societal attitude towards immigration and particular policy claims.

The survey is compliant with the EU 2016/679 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and it followed the Research Ethics Guidelines of the University of Latvia. The dataset is fully anonimized, and it does not contain any information that would allow identifying individual respondents.