Literacy and Life Skills for Pasifika Adults: Results from the Adult Literacy and Life Skills (ALL) Survey

Introduction

This report describes the distributions of prose literacy, document literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skill among the adult Pasifika population of New Zealand in 2006. It is intended to give a fairly high-level description of English literacy skill in the adult Pasifika population of New Zealand. For a more investigate approach (especially focussing on the relationship between English literacy skill, educational attainment and familiarity with English) see Literacy and Life Skills for Pasifika Adults – Further Investigation.

These descriptions of skill-distribution in the current report are analysed by a number of factors. These factors are:

• Age
• Gender
• Labour force status
• Educational attainment
• Language most frequently spoken when at home
• First language
• Place of birth
• Income.
  

For each of the above factors the analysis is preceded by a brief description of the distribution of the factor of interest.

For example, the distribution of age amongst Pasifika adults is presented, followed by distributions of literacy, numeracy and problem-solving levels for Pasifika adults at several age-groups. The descriptive statistics for the other factors follow a similar pattern to those for age.

There is also a section presenting mean literacy scores for Samoan, Cook Island Maori, Tongan, Niuean, and Other Pasifika ethnic populations⁵ of groupings determined by the above factors. For example, the mean literacy scores for Samoan, Cook Island Maori, Tongan, Niuean, and Other Pasifika ethnic populations are presented disaggregated by age-group.

Literacy, numeracy and problem-solving levels are presented as it is straightforward to translate these into a description of the skills individuals possess (see The Adult Literacy and Life Skills (ALL) Survey: An Introduction for details⁶). However, these level statistics are not necessarily robust when estimated for small groups. For this reason, mean literacy scores are presented (instead of level statistics) when the data is disaggregated by ethnic group. Where estimates are of poor statistical quality (that is, they have high relative sampling error), they are not reported.

Footnotes

5. When respondents identified with more than one Pasifika ethnic group they were counted in each one.
   
6. For an extensive description of the skills that each level represents (for each of prose literacy, document literacy, numeracy and problem-solving), see the joint OECD and Statistics Canada publication: Learning a Living: First Results of the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey. This is available from the Statistics Canada website.