Ethnicity is a personal characteristic
Ethnicity is a personal characteristic and cannot be ascribed to families, households, businesses or other social constructs. However, there is a widespread perception that considerations of fictional entities such as 'European families' or 'Pacific households' may add value in some way to analysis.
Historic practice
There are many ways of approaching this problem. For example, in the past people would assign a family according to the ethnicities of the male parent if there was one, or by the ethnicities of the parent in the case of single-parent families. This approach may even have involved prioritising ethnic responses to assign a family to just one ethnic group.
A similar approach was used in the past for households, with the ethnicity of the householder (head of household, with the stated preference that this be an adult male) or occupier (for example, person who completed the dwelling questionnaire in a census) being used to define the category in which the household was counted.
This is now regarded as unacceptable because this does not fairly represent the characteristics of the household or any families it may contain.
Current practice
The currently preferred method is to count a family within an ethnic group if any family member has identified themselves as belonging to the group.
This means that families containing people of several ethnicities will be counted in each of the relevant ethnic groups. Although this involves some rather dubious conceptual issues, the advantage of this approach is that it does not arbitrarily exclude members on the basis of their role (as coded) within the family.
Families are coded structurally because there is generally no information available to identify the actual social dynamic between the members which would enable the identification of any potentially dominant cultural identity. The family is always coded with a parent/partner relationship taking precedence, whereas all decision-making may lie with an adult child or other member of the unit.
Back to Ethnicity
Back to Resource page - Family and household projections
Back to Resource page - Family data from 2001 census
Back to Resource page - Household data from 2001 census
Back to Resource page - Overview of families in New Zealand