MIDEM HYBRID-TALK: Misconceptions about immigration in Switzerland: Well informed but uncertain?

Perceptions of immigration tend to be inaccurate and characterized by both a propensity to overestimate and a strong negativity bias. At the same time, the study of these misperceptions is often hampered by a lack of conceptual consistency and robust measures. This presentation reports preliminary results from a large-N survey in Switzerland, introduces a novel item battery to capture different elements of immigration-specific misperceptions, and applies a certainty measure to better distinguish between actual misperceptions (i.e., beliefs that contradict the best available evidence) and simple uninformedness (i.e., responses that contradict this evidence but are not based on beliefs). While most respondents do not estimate poorly, they express a fairly high degree of uncertainty—a fact that could have implications for research on misperceptions far beyond the Swiss case.