I wonder how widespread the following practice is:
If a respondent reports more than one ethnicity, the ethnicity attributed is determined according to a hierarchical classification of Māori, Pacific Island, Other and then European/Pākehā.
This is out of the Household Incomes Report which uses data from the Household Economic Survey conducted by Statistics NZ.
I was reflecting on Greg Newbold's comments yesterday about Maori violent crime stats being too high.
Statistics NZ also collects and publishes crime stats. Based on the above "hierarchical classification" if you do anything wrong and are of mixed ethnicity, it's the Maori bit of you that did it.
3 comments:
Interesting. I have heard people talk about ticking "Maori" just in case it will lead to some kind of financial incentive (from whom?? The government, the iwi or something else?). Some clearly have no Maori heritage whatsoever.
Combining this with the hierachical classification system would lead to very distorted results indeed.
It's a basic problem with categories that don't have clearly-defined edges - you have to implement workarounds that force the borderline cases into one category or another. "Ethnicity" is an obvious one, but even "Sex" requires that kind of workaround these days.
"..if you do anything wrong and are of mixed ethnicity, it's the Maori bit of you that did it."
And?
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