Ethnic Differences in the Quality of the Interview Process and Implications for Survey Analysis: The Case of Indigenous Australians

RESEARCH ARTICLE Ethnic Differences in the Quality of the Interview Process and Implications for Survey Analysis: The Case of Indigenous Australians Francisco Perales1*, Bernard Baffour1☯, Francis Mitrou2☯ 1 ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course, Institute for Social Science Research, The University of Queensland, Postal address: ISSR, Building 39a (GPN3), The University of Queensland, QLD 4072, Brisbane, Australia, 2 ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course, Telethon Kids Institute, The University of Western Australia, Postal address: Telethon Kids Institute, 100 Roberts Road, Subiaco, WA 6008, Perth, Australia a11111 ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. * Abstract Published: June 19, 2015 Comparable survey data on Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians are highly sought after by policymakers to inform policies aimed at closing ethnic socio-economic gaps. However, collection of such data is compromised by group differences in socio-economic status and cultural norms. We use data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey and multiple-membership multilevel regression models that allow for individual and interviewer effects to examine differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in approximate measures of the quality of the interview process. We find that there are both direct and indirect ethnic effects on different dimensions of interview process quality, with Indigenous Australians faring worse than non-Indigenous Australians in all outcomes ceteris paribus . This indicates that nationwide surveys must feature interview protocols that are sensitive to the needs and culture of Indigenous respondents to improve the quality of the survey information gathered from this subpopulation. Copyright: © 2015 Perales et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Introduction OPEN ACCESS Citation: Perales F, Baffour B, Mitrou F (2015) Ethnic Differences in the Quality of the Interview Process and Implications for Survey Analysis: The Case of Indigenous Australians. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0130994. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0130994 Editor: Ignacio Correa-Velez, Queensland University of Technology, AUSTRALIA Received: October 17, 2014 Accepted: May 27, 2015 Data Availability Statement: This paper uses unit record data from the HILDA Survey. The HILDA Project was initiated and is funded by the Australian Government Department of Social Services (DSS) and is managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research (Melbourne Institute). Data are available for researchers who meet the criteria for access. See: http://www. melbourneinstitute.com/hilda/. Funding: The authors have no support or funding to report. The amount of cross-sectional and longitudinal Australian survey data available to researchers and policymakers for social commentary and decision-making has grown exponentially in the past two decades, paralleling the rise of computing power to simplify data collection, enable large data storage, and speed up statistical data analysis. As a consequence, more information is being collected about more of the population in Australia. This includes the general population and the various cultural, geographical, and socio-economic population subgroups that comprise Australian society. One of the subpopulations of most interest in Australia are persons from an Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander background (referred hereafter as Indigenous Australians), comprising individuals who identify as descendants of the original inhabitants of the land prior to PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0130994 June 19, 2015 1 / 20 Ethnic Differences in the Quality of the Interview Process Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. colonization [1]. Around 550,000 Australians identified as Indigenous in the 2011 Australian Census of Population and Housing, compared to around 19,900,000 Australians who identified as non-Indigenous [2]. Thus, Indigenous people comprise about 3% of the total population in Australia. Information about Indigenous Australians is highly sought after by policy makers to underpin decisions about policies and programs developed specifically for this sub-population. Indigenous Australians are amongst the most disadvantaged population groups in Australia, suffering ongoing effects from European colonization. In its earlier phase, these included human-rights abuses and institutionalized discrimination in the form of genocide, land appropriation and removal of children from their families. Even in more socially enlightened times, the stubbornly persistent gap in socio-economic outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians has remained an important social issue for Australian society and a focus of policy planning. From the 1970s successive Australian Governments have supported policies designed to help rectify the negative impacts on Indigenous wellbeing of policies from previous eras. Early policies focused on achieving ‘statistical equality’ and more recent ones changed the discourse to one of ‘practical reconciliation’ [3]. Most recently, the Closing the Gap initiative brings together State, Territory and Commonwealth Governments to address Indigenous disadvantage [4]. Indicators derived from social survey data are routinely used by governments to monitor the progress of these initiatives, and so comparable good-quality data on both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians is of utmost importance to understand the social determinants of ethnic-based socio-economic gaps in outcomes in Australia. However, collecting such data in a reliable way is challenging, with the 2008 National Indigenous Reform Agreement (NIRA) specifically emphasizing the need to improve data quality on Indigenous Australians as a means of closing the outcome gap. There is a long-running debate on the inherent trade-off between survey practice standardization to achieve consistency and the appropriateness of survey tools to the Indigenous cultural context [5]. As will be discussed further later in the paper, Indigenous Australians are a largely distinctive sub-population in Australia. Not only do they have, on average, lower socio-economic status and live in more remote and deprived areas, but also hold cultural values and worldviews that differ from those of non-Indigenous Australians. As a result, Indigenous Australians have below average propensities to agree to participate in social surveys, and a higher propensity to drop out of longitudinal surveys that follow individuals over time. We argue that, additional to these, because population surveys are designed to fit the circumstances and cultural norms of (...truncated)