AKA: social cohesion, social division, race relations, racism, racial division
Key notes
- This is not a well-researched metric by the research community, and we can not find any time series that show how this has shifted over time. However, Essential Research has just polled a sample of 1,154 New Zealanders on the issue which is why we have a current view in time.
- Unlike the first 9 KPIs which were harder quantitative data sets, social unity/division is based on polling human feelings.
- Remember that each Labour-led or National-led government has had coalition partners that share the successes, and the failures, with them. A full list of governments for this time range is at the bottom of this page.
Data sources
Data shown:
- % who responded to the question = ‘Do you think New Zealand is....?’
- Options =
- …becoming much less divided
- …becoming a little less divided
- …staying about the same
- …becoming a little more divided
- …becoming much more divided
Full data:
Frequency:
- Monthly (although we are not sure of their plans to keep this polling going or not)
Updated:
Last update:
Next update:
- ? It depends on when the various research companies decide to ask this again. We have encouraged all of them to measure this ongoing. Essential did not ask the question again in September.
Why this KPI?
- As mentioned above, this issue is not measured very well by the research industry in their issues rankings.
- However, 3 different questions from 3 different pollsters (Essential, 1News Verian, and NZ Herald Dynata) have all shown that ⅔ to ¾ of New Zealanders feel we’ve become more divided, and ~½ believe race relations are getting worse.
- With ⅔ of those researchers asking a very similar question, we have gone with social division as the KPI for measuring social unity.
- We are conscious that using the wording ‘divided’ in the answer options could have produced a more negative result, however, a) using a term like ‘united’ could have produced the reverse bias b) they did lead with ‘much less divided’ first and c) we have not seen any better data.
- Because this issue and KPI is not well researched over time, we have put it in our top 10 issues, but in 10th spot. We have encouraged all research companies to include this question in their future issues lists so that we can get a more accurate read on how it sits against other issues over time.
Discarded
None
Related facts
Wishlist
With support, we’ll be able to add multiple KPIs for each issue:
- Updates on many of KPIs listed above.
- Trust scores:
- Government
- Media
- Corporate businesses
- Academics
- Scientists
- Health professionals
Government’s over the timeframe shown
- 2017 = Labour/NZ First+Green
2020 = Labour+Green
Sources:1,2 (table 5).
© Essential
Republished with permission
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