What factors into the Expat Insider 2016 country ranking?
The rating process emphasizes the respondents’ personal satisfaction with various aspects and considers both emotional topics such as the friendliness of the local population as well as more factual aspects (e.g. affordability of healthcare) with equal weight.
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For the country ranking, survey participants were asked to rate 43 different aspects of life abroad on a scale of one to seven. The respondents’ ratings of the individual factors were then bundled in various combinations for a total of 16 subcategories, and their mean values used to draw up five topical indices. These five indices, as well as the responses to the question: “how satisfied are you with life abroad in general?”, were then averaged in order to arrive at the overall country ranking.
For a country to be featured in the indices and consequently in the overall ranking, a sample size of at least 50 survey participants per country was necessary. The only exception to this is the Family Life Index, where a sample size of more than 30 respondents raising children abroad was required. In 2016, 67 and 45 countries respectively met these requirements. However, in many countries the sample size exceeded 50 or even 100 participants by far.
