ACCOUNTING FOR SOCIAL DIFFERENCE WHEN MEASURING CULTURAL DIVERSITY

ACCOUNTING FOR SOCIAL DIFFERENCE WHEN MEASURING CULTURAL DIVERSITY

We introduce a measure of cultural diversity of a population that is composed of groups classified by country of birth and/or ethnicity. Our measure takes ‘social difference’ between these groups into account. We measure social difference by exploratory factor analysis of subjective identity, attitude and value responses in Aotearoa New Zealand’s 2016 General Social Survey. We examine the level of, and change in, our social difference-based measure of cultural diversity in 31 urban areas between 1976 and 2018, using census data. We compare these patterns with those derived from a standard fractionalisation measure of diversity. We find that the two diversity measures are highly correlated across the urban areas. Diversity increased everywhere between 1976 and 2018. However, the social difference-based measure increased much faster than the standard measure in all but one of the urban areas. This suggests that growth in the fractionalisation measure of diversity is likely to have underestimated the trend in experienced social difference.