{"id":3424,"date":"2006-08-09T11:11:15","date_gmt":"2006-08-09T11:11:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2006\/08\/census-night\/"},"modified":"2011-02-05T07:47:06","modified_gmt":"2011-02-05T07:47:06","slug":"census-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2006\/08\/census-night\/","title":{"rendered":"Census night"},"content":{"rendered":"

How did you interpret the intent of Census Question 22 “Does the person ever need someone to help with, or be with them for, communication activities?” What’s ‘Australian’ ancestry (C.Q.18)? As always, census forms raises concerns of interpreting the questions, and interpreting the answers to the questions, especially when the forms are being filled out by speakers of other languages.
\nMonday’s Sydney Morning Herald<\/i> has a short article<\/a> on the physical problems of doing the census at Wadeye, in particular the fact that they have “hired eight Wadeye residents who translate the questions for people into their local language and then fill in the answers for them.” A good start. The mention that John Taylor was there as an observer took me back to his excellent co-authored paper “Making sense of the census: observations of the 2001 enumeration in remote Aboriginal Australia.”<\/a><\/p>\n


\nFrances Morphy’s careful observations of the 2001 census taking in Arnhem Land are well worth reading. Good planning avoided some problems, for example having pairs of census-helpers reduced the chances of the census-helper being unable to talk to the person whose details were being taken because of an avoidance relation. But much of the process took place in English:
\n“Everybody found the process of the interview a bit strange: they were Indigenous actors in a non-Indigenous scenario. Although everyone would normally speak to one another in the local language, the enumerators initially asked the questions in English, and the respondents replied likewise. ”
\nShe discusses the problem of interpreting kinship terms (as in the 2006 census question 53 “What is the person’s relationship to Person 1\/Person 2?”). Transforming Indigenous language kinship terms into English terms, even if done accurately, could result in misrepresentation of how ‘extended’ the family is living in a house. Here’s a made-up example: a ‘single men’s camp’ household might consist of men who call each other ‘brother’. In English translation they might appear as a household of brothers, first cousins and second cousins – which seems more distant. And it would only be an accident that they were all men – thus obliterating a local socially important household category.
\nHer observations show how carefully we need to interpret the results of questions on knowledge of language, when for example:
\n“E1 also began the task of making the responses to certain questions on the SIPFs consistent. For example, all schoolchildren and preschoolers were put down as speaking English ‘not well’.”
\nBut hey! at least we have a census which asks about languages, heritage and birth-places of parents. And it does provide interesting and important evidence of Australia’s changing language ecology, as you can see in Sandra Kipp and Michael Clyne’s 2003 ‘Trends in the shift from community languages: Insights from the 2001 Census’<\/a>. People and Place<\/i> 11, 33-41.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How did you interpret the intent of Census Question 22 “Does the person ever need someone to help with, or be with them for, communication activities?” What’s ‘Australian’ ancestry (C.Q.18)? As always, census forms raises concerns of interpreting the questions, and interpreting the answers to the questions, especially when the forms are being filled out … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-indigenous-australia-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3424"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4436,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3424\/revisions\/4436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}