Mobility Framing Effects in Migration Surveys: A Research Note with Experimental Evidence from Senegal
Migration remains one of the most unpreditable demographic processes. In the absence of reliable data on behaviour, migration researchers have increasingly adopted the use of aspirations elicited through survey questions, partly as a proxy for behaviour. While previous research has highlighted the predictive power of migration aspirations, research is starting to explore its sensitivity to survey instrument design. In this research note, we examine the risk of a mobility framing effect, where framing survey questions around migration rather than staying may inflate estimates. Based on a survey experiment in Senegal with random assignment to staying or migration preference frames, we find that mobility frames yield 12 percentage point higher migration aspirations than staying frames. We show that these differences cannot be explained by agreement bias - the tendency of respondents to agree survey statements regardless of the question. Instead, we interpret the difference as evidence of a framing effect in migration aspiration estimates which has important implications for the demographic analysis of migration, especially in relation to forecasting.
Murken, N., K. Schewel and J. Tjaden (2026), Mobility Framing Effects in Migration Surveys: A Research Note with Experimental Evidence from Senegal. Demography, 63, 3, 759-769