Summary
Statistics of ethnic origin have a long and troubled history in the Australian census, due partly to the risk of their being used, or abused, for political purposes. This article is concerned with census series under the headings of race up to the 1960s, origin in the 1970s and ancestry in 1986. The changing faces of these questions are viewed in the light of general principles that ideally should apply to all such collections, with the conclusion that the ancestry question of 1986 has still not solved the quest for valid and reliable statistics of ethnic origin.
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Horn, R.V. Ethnic origin in the Australian Census. Journal of Population Research 4, 1–12 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03029575
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03029575