There are several ways to measure cultural diversity. The best way for you depends on several factors:
- Do you own a large dataset?
- Are you focused on customers, prospects, employees or geography?
- Do you have expertise and sufficient resource to administer a survey – including design, promotion, management, collation and reporting?
- Do you have in-house analytical resource, or do you prefer an out-sourced solution?
The following table summarises the options
| Data Source |
Pros |
Cons |
| General Survey – ABS Census |
- High coverage
- Inexpensive
- Excellent for national and regional area reporting and analysis
|
- Aggregated area-based data; not applicable to individual
- Relies on Country of Birth
- Ancestry data is ambiguous
- No nuance
|
| Context-specific Survey – Self-Reported Data |
- Mostly accurate
- Allows for nuances eg parent/grandparent ancestry, granular definitions of ethnicity, world view, language skills
- Good for small numbers
- “Narrow and Deep”
|
- Not practical for large databases
- Response rate and response quality vary by context, empathy with purpose, quality of ‘sell’
- Comparing with census data as a base to represent market view is not valid
- Variable participant commitment and diligence
- Privacy concerns; suspicion
- High administrative overhead for users
|
| Surname Tables |
- Less aggregated than Census
- Simple (but error-prone)
|
- Credibility depends on substantial globally-sourced data resources
- Broad brush
- Inference-based
|
| First and family names with geography |
- High coverage – 99.5%+
- High accuracy of name origin; v good correlation with cultural background
- Ambiguous names use census-based probability
- More accurate than Surname Tables
- No privacy concerns
- Highly practical
- Cost-effective for medium/high volume turnover applications
- “Broad and Indicative”
|
- Not best suited for ATSIC
- Probabilistic
- One-dimensional; single code overall, and for each of first and family name
|
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