Abstract
Investigating individual level-Indigenous identification change by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians has been enabled through the linkage of census data across time. This study focusses on the population who moved from an identification of Indigenous in the 2011 census to not Indigenous in the 2016 census. We calculated transition probabilities for a range of personal characteristics to investigate the influence of broad life-course transitions on the pattern of identification change. In addition to age, we found that sex, employment, mixed ancestry, interstate migration, and living arrangements had the strongest associations with the risk of a transition to not Indigenous. The highest transition probabilities were at each end of the adult life-course and the role of “not stated” was implicated, destabilising assumptions that decisions to identify as Indigenous, or not, always reflect personal agency. Finally, the paper challenges the adequacy of an origin-based identity question to define the increasingly complex ethnic histories of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people. Both improved definition and enumeration of Indigenous Australians are fundamental to current national conversations about constitutional recognition and continuing gaps in measured health and wellbeing.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 53 |
| Pages (from-to) | 42-53 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Population Research and Policy Review |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Aug 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:One author of this paper is an Aboriginal woman while the remaining authors are not Indigenous. They are grateful to the members of the Indigenous Reference Group convened for the purpose of guiding this research. Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Indigenous are all terms used in this paper to describe Australia’s First Peoples. While we acknowledge the limitations of these words to define the diversity of the population, the generalised term “Indigenous” has been mainly used in this paper to avoid potential confusion by international readers. Ethics approval was granted by the Charles Darwin University Human Research Ethics Committee (reference H20049).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s).