Foreword.

AuthorGray, Don

Issue 36 of the Social Policy Journal of New Zealand contains a major theme on Measuring Ethnicity, and the guest editor for these papers is Paul Callister from Victoria University of Wellington. This issue also includes a theme on KiwiSaver, a paper based on data from the Christchurch Health and Development Study, and research papers on a range of topics, including social welfare benefits, the social services sector, childhood nutrition and the costs of blindness.

Nearly half of Issue 36 is devoted to papers, research notes and book reviews on the theme of Measuring Ethnicity. Paul Callister's "An Introduction to the Theme" describes how these papers came to be. There are five main issues papers. The first, by Julie Walling, Desi Small-Rodriguez and Tahu Kukutai compares Waikato-Tainui iwi registration data with Census data and recommends that in future the Census question should include an iwi registration prompt.

Tahu Kukutai and Paul Callister look at the increasing proportion of young people who identify with multiple ethnicities, and explore how their general willingness to pick their "main" ethnic group can potentially help us better understand multiple ethnicity. Drawing on longitudinal data from SoFIE, Kristie Carter, Michael Hayward, Tony Blakely and Caroline Shaw, of Otago University's Health Inequalities Research Programme, explore changes in self-defined ethnic identity over time; they determine several interesting predictors of changing ethnic self-identification, one of which is having poorer self-rated health.

According to the article by Tahu Kukutai and Robert Didham, people are increasingly choosing to identify "New Zealander" as one of their ethnicities. This includes people who previously would have described themselves as "New Zealand European", as well as people of other ethnicities, such as Maori, who are choosing the term "New Zealander" instead of or as well as other ethnic identities--and the authors explore this pattern in the context of parallel trends in Canada and Australia. In the last of the main Measuring Ethnicity papers, Paul Callister and Robert Didham use the findings of the Human Genome project as a launching point to compare cultural and biological constructions of the concepts of race and ethnicity.

The Measuring Ethnicity theme also includes research notes and book reviews. Paul Hamer discusses the challenges to measuring Maori in Australia, and why it is worthwhile making the effort. Frances Leather...

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