Ethnic mobility: is it important for research and policy analysis?

Abstract

Public policy discussions involving ethnicity often assume that people remain in fixed ethnic categories over their lifecycles. While New Zealand research carried out a decade ago had already identified ethnic mobility in the census in relation to Māori, the dramatic and somewhat unexpected increase in ‘New Zealander’- type responses in the 2006 census provided a very high profile example of people changing their responses to ethnicity questions. Research into the growth of New Zealander-type responses in the census has focused primarily on whether these are valid responses, how they should be recorded and reported on, and how these decisions might affect the overall usefulness of ethnicity data. One question in this research has been where these responses came from: that is, what these people recorded in the previous census.