The Perspective
2022 was another busy and fruitful year for CIRCA. Across 26 projects this year we were able to speak with nearly 500 people from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, Syrian, Bhutanese, Samoan, Arabic-, Mandarin-, Cantonese-, Vietnamese-, Italian-, Dari-, Korean-, French-, Nepali-, and Tagalog/Filipino-speaking backgrounds.
CIRCA recently completed a really interesting piece of work exploring interment practices and preferences among different cultural groups in the eastern part of Sydney. Though the topic of death, burial, and cremation sounds morbid and grim we found that through in-person focus groups of people from similar backgrounds rich, dynamic, and animated conversations emerged.
CIRCA’s Director of Research and Evaluation, Lena Etuk casts a critical eye on the annoyingly consistent and problematic tendency for Australian research companies to undertake English language research with people from non- English backgrounds.
This colour blind approach is at best clumsy and at worst a risk as it can result in ineffective and misdirected communications and engagements strategies.
