Review into ethnicity statistics released

A review of government ethnicity data collection intends to end a practice that defines people as solely Maori if they describe themselves as having Maori and other ethnic backgrounds.

The Review of the Measurement of Ethnicity was released by Statistics New Zealand this week, after work started on the project in 2000.

More than 120 submissions had been received on the review, which looked at how ethnicity was defined, collected and organised, Government Statistician Brian Pink said in a statement.

The results would guide how ethnicity data was collected and the form in which it was published in the next census and, in time, all other official statistics.

A recommendation of the review is to stop the prioritising to a single ethnicity people who identify with more than one ethnic group.

The prioritisation system gave precedence to responses in the order: Maori, Pacific Peoples, Asian, Other and European, the review said.

An increasing number of people saying they belonged to more than one ethnic group meant prioritised data sets were becoming less useful.

Prioritisation also biased statistics. For example, under prioritisation people identifying as Rarotongan and Maori were placed in the Maori group.

After prioritisation of ethnic groups for 2001 data the number of Pacific Peoples decreased 14.7 per cent, the review said.

"Discontinuing the practice of output prioritisation has significant implications for many agencies. Most over-sampling and funding models use prioritised ethnicity data. Investigation of alternative models and systems will be necessary."

The review recommends two alternatives be used to record ethnicity information.

One, known as single/combination output, would record people as belonging to a single ethnic group or a combination of ethnic groups.

The other, total response output, would show all responses given for each ethnic group. Such a system would mean the total of ethnic group counts would be greater than the number of people who gave them.

"Nearly all Statistics New Zealand collections and those of other agencies will need to change the way they output data. This will take some time to implement, as collection and/or processing systems will need updating," the review said.

It also recognised the need to recognise the ethnicity of people who described themselves as "New Zealander" or similar.

"A growing number of people feel they do not fit into any of the current ethnic classification categories and want to identify and be counted as New Zealanders," the review said.

"This issue has increased antagonism among people who require an acceptable way of identifying themselves that is distinct from the traditional ethnic categories.

"Related to this are strong objections from some people to the term European in the category New Zealand European."

New Zealander-type responses had increased from around 50,000 in the 1996 Census to around 80,000 in the 2001 Census.

A comprehensive programme of research into the measurement of ethnicity in official statistics was to be finished by the end of 2009, the review said.

- NZPA