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First published online February 2, 2012

Answer Formats in British Census and Survey Ethnicity Questions: Does Open Response Better Capture ‘Superdiversity’?

Abstract

During a period of unprecedented ethnicity data collection in Britain, an almost universal characteristic of this practice has been the mandated use of the decennial census ethnicity classifications. In Canada and the USA a greater plurality of methods has included open response, now recommended for the 2020 US Census. As the ethnic diversity of Britain has increased, driven by immigration dynamics and population mixing leading to ‘superdiversity’, the census is no longer able to capture the new populations. The validity and utility of unprompted open response is examined in several ‘mixed race’ datasets. It is argued that open response can be a modus operandi for large-scale ethnicity data collection and that the lack of consistency in recording of such responses need not necessarily be viewed as a drawback. Open response offers substantial insights into the country’s superdiversity in a way that ethnicity categorization alone cannot.

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Published In

Pages: 354 - 364
Article first published online: February 2, 2012
Issue published: April 2012

Keywords

  1. categorization
  2. census
  3. mixed race
  4. open response
  5. superdiversity
  6. surveys

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Authors

Affiliations

Peter J Aspinall
University of Kent, UK

Notes

Peter J Aspinall, Centre for Health Services Studies, University of Kent, George Allen Wing, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NF, UK. Email: [email protected]
Peter J Aspinall is Reader in Population Health, School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent, Honorary Special Advisor to the London Health Observatory on ethnicity inequalities, and Research Advisor to the NIHR Research Design Service South East. He has pursued an active research interest in ethnicity terminology and classifications over the last 20 years and has published over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles in this and allied fields. In 1994–99 he was the Office for National Statistics’ National Convenor for the ethnicity question set in the 2001 Census Development Programme and is currently an Academic Advisory Group Member of the ONS Advisory Group on Language, Ethnicity, Religion, and National Identity for the 2011 Census. He is a Director and Trustee for a mixed race charity.

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