ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 “Methodology and Empirical Design” starts with a brief outline of the research project (“ENRI-East: European, National and Regional Identities”) that has provided the quantitative and qualitative data used in the book. It presents the basic population statistics of all researched minority groups: Russians in Latvia and Lithuania; Hungarians in Slovakia and Ukraine; Poles in Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania; Belarusians in Poland and Lithuania; Slovaks in Hungary; Ukrainians in Poland; and Lithuanians in Russia (Kaliningrad region). The following subchapter describes the design and the implementation of the quantitative data collection (“ENRI-VIS”), including the specific sampling methods and a detailed description of the sample (N = 6,800). The third subchapter provides information on the qualitative data collection (“ENRI-BIO”) and a detailed sample description (N = 132). The sampling frame for the biographical interviews included gender and age. Members of three generations of all researched minority groups were interviewed by using a biographical approach.
