What’s ethnicity got to do with it? Aotearoa’s growing ethnic diversity and implications for policy
This blog was originally posted on Medium.com in April 2020
EeMun Chen, Managing Director of Ethnic Research Aotearoa and an evaluation and research specialist from MartinJenkins, looks at what happens when people of multiple ethnicities meet up with the Census and other official statistics in Aotearoa.
The 2018 Census of Population and Dwellings has had a bit of a hammering due to the lowest response rates nationally for the past five surveys and the way in which the data was collected – the “digital first” model. Māori have been particularly vocal about the failings of Census 2018. The independent review into Census 2018 stated that only 68% of Māori responded to the Census. Having worked with a number of organisations, including the Independent Māori Statutory Board, this response rate is of great concern considering the Census has most likely not captured communities where we desperately need good, robust data: youth, rural, low socio-economic means, low social connections and networks, high mobility and/or homeless. And ‘imputation’ of data from administrative databases will further exacerbate the perception that certain rangatahi and whānau are not reaching their potential.
A voice that has not been heard in the conversation on the ‘botched’ census is from culturally and linguistically diverse communities. I have doubts that a representative proportion of all 51,000 tertiary international students filled out the 2018 Census or that administrative data was able to fill in enough gaps. I suspect that the rise of ghost houses, especially in Auckland’s North Shore, is not due to land-banking and overseas investors, but are only ghost houses in the census. In reality a large proportion are likely to be houses rented out to multiple international students who pay for everything including their rent by cash, WeChat or AliPay.
Back to the Census and other forms which ask for ethnicity, I have a lingering discomfort on:
whether we, as census form filler-out-ers and other form fillers, collectively, know what ‘ethnicity’ is
whether ‘ethnicity’ will matter or will continue to matter as New Zealand becomes more ethnically diverse
whether all this data on ‘ethnicity’ is used appropriately for government policy design and service delivery.
The Census and countless other forms now ask: ‘Which ethnic group do you belong to? Select all that apply to you.’ For many people, this is a harmless question and an easy one-second tick. But for many people this is complicated by different conceptualisations of nationality, race, identity and beliefs that don’t necessarily line up easily with one or multiple boxes.
Extract of 2023 New Zealand Census of Population and Dwellings Individual Form
Where are you from really?
The Census and countless other forms ask: Which ethnic group do you belong to? Select all that apply to you. For many people, this is a harmless question and an easy one-second tick.
For me, I’m part of a visible minority – Chinese – that gets aggregated into the group Asian. Asian is such a diverse group encompassing Korean, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Japanese, etc. China itself has 55 ethnic minority groups in addition to the Han majority. My parents are Chinese. They came from Malaysia and resided in Christchurch, New Zealand in the 1960s to study – dad from East Malaysia and mum from West Malaysia. I was born in Christchurch. People like me are referred to as ‘bananas’ – yellow on the outside, white on the inside. Recent migrants from mainland China don’t think of me as ‘real Chinese’. How do I convey all this by ticking a box, or multiple boxes?
So I don’t and leave the form with ‘Chinese’. In the Census, the National Health Index, education databases, and countless other databases, I am ‘Asian’. This probably reflects how I’m treated by the world around me, but doesn’t line up with how I perceive and experience my identity.
What is ethnicity? Ethnicity has been measured in some way through the New Zealand Census since the middle of the 19th century; however, the way it has been defined and measured has changed:
Until 1986, the question asked about ethnic origin but was based on race, and people of mixed race were required to report their ‘proportion of blood’
In 1986, ethnic origin in the question was retained, but asked respondents to ‘tick the box or boxes which apply to you’ based on cultural affiliation.
This move was due to changing public and user attitudes to race-based measures; New Zealand’s changing demography (including ethnic intermarriage); and that people were increasingly finding it harder to answer the question and were self-identifying anyway.
In official statistics, an ethnic group is people who have some or all of the following characteristics:
A common proper name
One or more elements of common culture, such as religion, customs or language
A unique community of interests, feelings or actions
A shared sense of common origins or ancestry
A common geographic origin.
This definition is based on the concept of cultural affiliation, which requires self-identification.
In 2009, 10 small focus groups and 9 case studies involving a range of people in New Zealand by descent, migration status, generational length of time in New Zealand, age, urbanity, and region for StatsNZ found that people viewed ethnicity as both subjective and self-identified, and objective and based on race and ancestry. It appears that us census-form filler-outers flip between self-identification and race/ancestry.
Previous reviews undertaken by StatsNZ have suggested more public information and communication about ethnicity statistics.
I’m a New Zealander
Photo by Fermin Rodriguez Penelas on Unsplash.
My husband usually writes ‘New Zealander’ on the census form as he doesn’t identify as ‘New Zealand European’ – ‘what do I have to do with Europe?! I’m from Christchurch, I’m a New Zealander’. He’s been known to write ‘Southern Man’ on the occasional form. The ‘New Zealand European’ category was introduced in the 1991 Census to appease people who have European ancestry but with strong generational attachments to New Zealand. The 2009 Review of the Official Ethnicity Statistical Standard noted a large increase in ‘New Zealander’ responses in the 2006 Census (just under 430,000 people identified as New Zealander on their census form in 2006. A public media campaign encouraged people to give this response that year) and StatsNZ stated that they were ‘concern[ed] about [the] public reaction to the ethnicity topic because, as well as indicating possible problems with our measurement process, it has the potential to undermine trust and confidence in the measure and even the census itself’.
As a result of the review the format of the ethnicity question remain unchanged, there would be no additional ‘national identity’-related measure to future Census and the current standard of assigning ‘New Zealander’ to ‘Other ethnicity’ would be retained.
In 2013, 67,752 people were categorised as ‘Other ethnicity’. Most of these people identified as ‘New Zealander’ (65,973 or 97%). Recently released statistics from the 2018 Census show that 58,053 people were classified as ‘Other ethnicity’, a decline from 2013.
I don’t usually indicate ‘New Zealander’ and ‘Asian’ in census or other forms, but I wonder if I should, as it provides more/better information on my identity.
Multiple ethnic identities
The 2004 review of the measurement of ethnicity discontinued ‘prioritised ethnicity data as standard output’. Prior to 2004, if you reported multiple ethnicities StatsNZ would allocate you to one ethnic category based on an arbitrary ranking of the ethnic responses. This would mean that Pacific peoples and other minority groups would be increasingly undercounted. Now ‘Total response’ and ‘Single and combined response’ classifications are used.
‘Total response’ means that the number of people who have reported each ethnic category, no matter how many they reported, are recorded. This means that the sum will be more than the population, and those of multiple ethnicity are effectively hidden. In 2018, 11% of the population reported their ethnicity reported in more than one ethnic group. That’s almost 540,000 people – 30,000 more people than the entire Wellington region).
The problem with using ‘Total response’, which is what pretty much what everyone uses, is that as the number of people with mixed heritage grows, the percentages will exaggerate European people as a proportion of New Zealand’s total population and exaggerate the rise of minority ethnicities. Using ‘Total response’ European were 70%, Māori 17% and Asian 15% (up from 12% in 2013) of the population in 2018. While under ‘Single and combined response’ European-only are 65% (falling from 60% in 2013), Māori-only 8% and Asian-only 14%. In the wrong hands, it can act as a powerful tool for anti-immigration agendas.
Photo by Omar Albeik on Unsplash
What does this mean for policy?
Census data helps government plan services, such as which District Health Board gets more or less funding, where schools should be built, where roads should go and where public transport should be maintained. But what happens when the ‘right’ data isn’t being collected? And the data that is being collected, and is reported, isn’t a true reflection of the people it’s supposed to be about? It means that policy makers and decision makers put funding in the wrong places or develop the wrong initiatives or programmes. This is at the heart of the conversation regarding Census 2018.
Is my single dot point of ‘Asian’ helpful? What would change if I selected ‘Chinese’ and ‘New Zealander’?
Research in the US suggests that people from mixed families look more like white Europeans than they do like minorities, except for those who are partly African American. This blurring of differences from European appears to be particularly so for people from mixed Asian and European families. They will be viewed as European, English will tend to be language of choice at home and their friends will tend to be European. In New Zealand there have been some, mostly quantitative, studies of the effect of intermarriage and multiple ethnicities, but most focus on Māori as one of the ethnicities. The international and New Zealand literature and data shows that making ethnic choices for children is complex, and a proportion of children of ethnic intermarriage will choose to emphasise one ethnicity over another.
Governments are not geared up to understand or respond to a new generation of people. 23% of people under 15 years old (almost 120,000 kids) identify with more than one ethnic group. How might people with multiple cultures and heritage perceive and experience their identity and how might this affect employment, wellbeing, housing, health, etc? Heck, governments aren’t even geared up to understand and respond to minority ethnic communities – full stop. The terrible events in Christchurch brought to bear how ethnic communities are removed from policy discussion. Government agencies were warned many times of the rise of alt-right groups and growing discrimination of Muslim people in New Zealand.
In a New Zealand where there is increasing ethno-racial diversity and fluidity (there is evidence of ethnic-mobility whereby people’s ethnicity changes between census collections) how best can data collection, data interpretation and data visualisation support a ‘true picture’ of our diversity? And what might this mean for evidence-based policy?
We need to revisit:
whether ‘ethnicity’, as self-identified cultural affiliation, is still relevant and important from a data collection and policy evidence point of view
how we report, understand and use ethnicity data. At the very least we should report ‘Single and combined response’ not ‘Total response’, and undertake (more) qualitative studies on the lived experience of people with mixed-ethnicities.
A shortened version of this piece also appears in Public Sector Rāngai Tūmatanui, Volume 43 Issue 2, July 2020 - The journal of Hāpai Public
