Sense of belonging

Ethnic differences

Differences between ethnic groups for this indicator were mostly small, with one exception.

Tthe PISA study found that Asian 15 year old students were significantly more likely (14.8 percent) to agree or strongly agree than students of other ethnic groups (between 6 and 9 percent) that they felt “like an outsider” at school. 

Proportion of 15 year olds who feel ‘like an outsider’ and/or ‘awkward and out of place’, by ethnic group, 2003
  Strongly agree
(%)		 Agree
(%)		 Disagree
(%)		 Strongly disagree
(%)
Feel like
an outsider 		Pakeha 1.4 5.2 46.0 47.4
Māori 1.5 6.9 41.5 50.1
Pacific 3.1 3.7 38.9 54.3
Asian 3.0 11.7 51.6 33.7
Feel awkward
or out of place 		Pakeha 1.4 7.9 50.9 39.8
Māori 2.2 10.8 47.2 39.9
Pacific 2.9 8.9 49.4 38.8
Asian 1.6 12.3 59.4 26.7
Source: PISA 2003, prioritised ethnicity data.  Missing responses have been excluded from denominator. 

Notes

We encourage you to be cautious about drawing conclusions from comparisons between ethnic groups.  Apparent differences (in unadjusted data) between ethnic groups can often be explained by factors other than ethnicity per se, such as the different age, sex, geographical and socioeconomic distributions of different ethnic populations.  In addition, datasets vary in the way that they collect and record ethnicity data.