As you might have noticed, there has been limited blog activity for the past month – I have been running around the country chasing up some very interesting tourism research I have been involved with (see ontrackblog.desertknowledgecrc.com.au), and members of our team – Andrew Taylor, Suzanne Campbell, Doris Schmallegger – have likewise been out and about collecting data and giving presentations.
Most significantly, those ‘back home’, lead by Kate Golebiowska, have been frantically preparing for the 2008 Australian Population Association Conference in Alice Springs at the end of this month. Kate has asked me to give you an update as follows -
The conference (30tJune – 3 July) is a major national and international event and attracts around 200 delegates from Australia, New Zealand, the Asia-Pacific region as well as Europe and the US. It is the first time that this biennial conference is to be held in the Northern Territory (thanks to Dr Tom Wilson who promoted the idea and took it forward in mid-2006) and our team here at the SSPR has jumped into organising it. Apart from overseeing the technical aspects of the conference, including such mundane yet responsible tasks as for example putting together the conference program, liaising with plenary and session speakers, volunteering delegates to chair sessions, and alike (Kate Golebiowska and Andrew Taylor, whenever back in the office, with great assistance from Professor Tony Barnes and others), we have also ensured that our own research is presented at the conference.
The major conference themes include the Indigenous Demography, Policy Responses to Demographic Change and The Demography of Australia’s Northern Neighbours. Our presentations will be based on the Mobility Project as well as will fall under the theme of Indigenous Demography. For example, Dr Dean Carson assumes the MC role (and the rumour has it that he’ll be asking for a whistle, as a certified basketball coach, to herd everyone back to the session rooms after coffee breaks) as well as presents a paper on ‘Surviving the Territory – Group differences in migration intentions among non-Indigenous residents of the Northern Territory’. We will also have a strong presence at the poster session. Our SSPR Communications team deserves a credit for putting together the media strategy to ensure that the conference discussions regarding the future of Australia’s population are heard outside the meeting rooms. Check out the conference website, this year’s eminent Borrie lecture speaker – the Australian Statistician Mr Brian Pink, our excellent plenary speakers and more at: http://www.nt.gov.au/ntt/apa2008/.
As part of the conference, we are also preparing a special issue of the Journal of Population Research publishing peer reviewed ‘pick of the litter’ papers attached to each of the three conference themes. At this stage, we plan to have the issue on the shelves in November, publishing timeframes permitting!
Categories: Publishing our results
Net overseas migration (NOM) appears to be the biggest contributor to NT population growth outside of natural increase, but there has been relatively little research done on overseas migration patterns to the Northern Territory. Dr Kate Golebiowska is our leading researcher in this area, with a PhD looking at regional international migration in Canada and Australia. Kate has been doing some work on how different patterns of overseas migration to the NT may be to patterns experienced in the rest of Australia. This work is the foundation for what research agenda we might then usefully pursue. Kate has found two interesting issues worthy of further investigation – a relatively high level of ‘temporary’ migration, and a substantially different mix of family, skilled, and refugee in-migrants than experienced in Australia overall.
Overseas migration broadly comes from two sources – ‘permanent’ migrants and ‘long term’ migrants who are on temporary visas of twelve months or more. Although total NOM figures are published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, details of long-term arrivals and long-term departures for States and Territories are not. Figuring out the contribution of long-term migration requires matching the total NOM figures (ABS) with the permanent arrivals and departures published by the Department of Immigration. Kate’s calculations suggest that between 2001-02 and 2005-06 the net long-term movements in the NT represented between 55.4 per cent and 84.1 per cent of NOM. Long-term movement therefore contributes more to NOM than the permanent movement. This pattern adds to the transient nature of the NT population overall with a transient (and predictably transient) immigrant population.
A more detailed understanding of the character of the permanent (settler) migration in the Territory can be obtained by looking at the recent composition of the migration streams. The three largest streams are family migration, skilled migration and humanitarian migration (including refugees and so on). The graph shows the proportion of immigrants to Australia and NT by each stream for years 2001 – 2006.
The composition of international migration in NT differs from that Australia-wide in all three principal streams. A striking difference can be observed in the percentage contribution of the family stream in the NT and in Australia – it has been decreasing but it remains still higher in the Territory than in Australia in 2005-06. While in the former, the skill stream has represented the largest and generally growing proportion of the settler arrivals, in the NT it has represented the second largest contributor, but with much lower proportions. The 2005-06 may mark the beginning of a slow convergence towards the national trends though with the skill stream’s contribution at 35 per cent and (still behind that of Australia as a whole) the family stream’s contribution decreasing to 30 per cent. Finally, the humanitarian entrants have recently represented a higher proportion of all settler arrivals in the Territory than their proportion has been in settler arrivals for the whole of Australia. Continued monitoring of these trends warrants attention as they may indicate that a revision of migrant support services is needed (family, humanitarian streams), or that the Territory needs to attract skilled migrants (professionals, business people) more vigorously.
We need to understand the reasons why these patterns have emerged, and their consequences for the Northern Territory – policy implications, economic implications (like workforce planning) and social and cultural implications. There is a lot of work to do in our international migration research…
Categories: Overseas Migration
A recent workshop organised by the NT Department of Justice brought attention to a perception of high levels of ‘urban drift’ occurring in the Northern Territory and largely impacting (as destinations) Darwin and Alice Springs. The workshop discussed both what the extent of the ‘drift’ might be, and its implications primarily for government. The focus was on movements of Indigenous people from rural areas into the larger towns. Our research team is looking at how we might conceive of rural-to-urban migration in the NT context, and whether the causes and consequences can be explained using existing theories of internal migration. Our research then looks to suggest what could be done from a policy and research perspective to help alleviate the negative consequences of urban drift while maintaining the positive outcomes that can result from urbanisation.
Census statistics since 1971 have shown a pattern of urbanisation of Indigenous people in the NT evidenced by more rapid population growth in Darwin and Alice Springs. Natural population growth (births outnumbering deaths) explains some of this, but the rest is largely explained by internal (within the NT) migration. In the past two or three Census periods we have seen a ‘flow’ of people from smaller to larger places. That flow is represented in the map below. So rural people move into towns, small town people move to bigger towns and so on. The exception recently has been Nhulunbuy, which has attracted a lot of intra-Territory migration probably because of increased job opportunities there.
At the surface, there are some clear reasons for urban drift in the NT – moving into town for sporting events, medical care, school, work, because of exile from home communities, or to improve access to drugs and alcohol. Many of these movements of individuals then resulted in predictable and unpredictable movements of other individuals. Predictable movements, for example, could be around hospitalisation of a community member meaning other community members would move into town to be near the sick person. Less predictable movements could be around people choosing to spend some time in town because they now knew somebody who was there and had access to housing or money or some other ‘facilitating’ commodity.
Broadly speaking, two streams of theory on migration help explain what happens in these cases. Labour related migration theory (notably the Harris-Todaro models) have done a very good job of predicting who will move where for overtly economic reasons (usually meaning finding work), and who will move with them. Other theories relating to “ghettoisation” and social mobility, and specifically the ideas of institutional economics, help explain the less obviously financially motivated movements.
We currently have a discussion paper looking at how these theories might apply circulating among our research team. We will formally publish the paper later this year. The paper also looks at the issues with getting good data on urban drift. The Census data is one lens – but data about circular, seasonal and ‘informal’ movements is really hard to get, and we are looking at how we might address that issue. There have been some other efforts to quantify ‘urban drift’ – specifically research by Tangentyere Council and Desert Knowledge CRC in Alice Springs and the Larrakiah Nation in Darwin. With our research, we want to go beyond quantifying to try and explain and offer models for managing outcomes.
Categories: Migration motives
Last Friday Professor Stephen Garnett and Dr Kate Golebiowska presented some of the findings from a year long study into the causes and consequences of population turnover among Northern Territory nurses. The study was funded by the NT Department of Health and Community Services, and the work team included people from the Department, Charles Darwin Uni, NT Treasury and assistance in data preparation from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. It was a very broad ranging piece of research looking at why nurses come, why they leave, why they might stay, and how much staff turnover costs. Detailed results will be released over the next few weeks. I don;t want to steal the thunder of the various reports – but I will give two highlights from the research that have already made it to various radio and television news items.
One of the interesting findings was that staff turnover had decreased in the past ten years or so. The research was able to look into this in more detail and found that what had actually happened was that fewer people stayed a very short period of time. It seems that people were generally staying long enough to at least work out their initial short term (one or two years) contracts, then leaving. At the other end of the service scale, there appeared to be a cohort of older nurses who were leaving the profession due to retirement. The image below shows the percentage of nurses still in the NT after a period of time.
Another thing that was interesting was the length of time that nurses thought it took to become ‘work ready’ or ‘fully productive’ when they started work in the NT. Nearly half said they were ready to go straight away, while a third said it took them six months or so. Nurse managers tended to think that nurses underestimated the length of time it took them to get up to speed, and there were definite groups who seemed to take longer. Overseas trained nurses, and particularly those not trained in English, took longer. So did nurses working in more remote areas. Nurses who had worked in the NT previously did not need as much time to get up to speed.
The study has provided a range of insights into social and professional reasons for coming to and leaving the NT. Greg Rickard from the Department of Health and Community Services told the audience that they were considering a range of recommendations from the research, and would provide a full report in the near future.
From our point of view, this has been valuable collaborative research demonstrating that we can not only gather data, but make it meaningful to our research funders and partners. Thanks to Stephen for coordinating the project so effectively.
Categories: Labour Force
The notion of ‘repeat visitors’ is considered important in tourism studies. Repeat visitors are those who go to a particular destination on multiple occasions throughout their lifetime. Many studies show that up to two thirds or three quarters of visitors in a destination at any time are repeat visitors. There is some discussion about whether repeat visitors are good or bad for a destination. On the good side, repeat visitors demonstrate customer loyalty, they provide a baseline of customers, they cost you less to market to, and they tend to have a higher sense of attachment to the destination, so they will work with you to improve things.
On the other side, if you are only attracting repeat visitors, you are not appealing to new customers, and you just keep churning out the same old products and ideas. Both cases (too few or too many) result in eventual declining markets as you either run out of new people to attract, or your old customers die. This has been likened to epidemiological models of disease spread. Unfortunately, no-one knows how many repeat visitors is the ‘right amount’.
Attracting resident populations to the Northern Territory can be likened to attracting tourism populations. The NT demonstrates very low rates of repeat tourism visitors (around 30 or 40%) when compared with other destinations. There are few studies anywhere on repeat migrations to places – there’s a bit of literature about ‘return migration’ which looks at people moving back to the place they started from, and some on circular or seasonal migration which looks at people moving in consistent patterns across time, but the ‘repeat migration’ we talk about here is somewhat different.
The Territory Mobility Survey included a sample of 98 people who had been born in the NT, moved away, then came back (the classic ‘return migrants’), and a sample of 332 people who were not born in the NT but had lived there multiple times. They offer an opportunity to start investigating issues of repeat visits –
- Do repeat visitors stay longer?
- Where do repeat visitors go when they are not in the NT, and how long do they stay there?
- Are they attracted or do they stay or leave for different reasons than first time visitors?
- Are there certain groups more likely than others to be repeat visitors?
This table summarises some of the raw data from the TMS, which suggests there may be some important differences in motives, demographic profile, and lengths of stay. These ideas will be developed as the research continues.
Categories: Migration motives
And here’s a short abstract of the research plan presented by another PhD student – Jamie Seaton.
[starts]
This research aims to investigate the impact of population mobility – the coming and going of people to and from the Northern Territory (NT) – on place narratives. In the NT, people come and go within a short period of time (see Figure 1 below). In comparison to the other regions of Australia, the NT’s population mobility rate is high. Between 1986 and 1991 the NT had a higher proportion of in-movers and out-movers than any other Australian state or territory (ABS 1994). The movement of these people could have many impacts on the way society functions in the NT. Such impacts might involve changes to employees in local businesses, changes to social networks and relationships, and even the loss of local knowledge. This research focuses on a different impact however, namely, the impact of population mobility on narratives written about Mindil Beach in Darwin. The research will therefore seek an answer to the following research question:
How does population turnover impact
upon the production of place narratives?
Specifically, I will be focussing on public narratives written by organisations and also by individuals that have interacted with Mindil Beach throughout history. Previous research has suggested that places are socially created and that individuals have the capacity to change the way society understands places that they use. Narratives are a cultural tool that people rely upon to communicate their ideas about Mindil Beach. An answer to the research question will be developed by collecting these narratives and comparing them to Darwin’s population changes throughout history. This comparison will also highlight the influence that a narrative creator has on Mindil Beach.
Categories: Migration motives
Two of our PhD students, Kalotina Halkitis and Jamie Seaton, presented overviews of their research at our seminar series last Friday (4th April). I have asked them to provide a shortr summary of what they are doing – this first one is from Kalotina – I’ve attached a copy of the presentation slides she used as well. kalotina_halkitis_staff-turnover-in-nt-hotels
[starts]
Staff turnover is a typical feature and challenge for all sectors in the Northern Territory. Tourism and the hotel sector experiences unpredictable, yet inevitable employee mobility/turnover for a number of reasons (e.g. emotional labour, and inadequate career development opportunities). Most research seems to focus on staff recruitment and retention strategies, but my PhD research is more concerned with understanding the extent to which staff turnover actually affects business performance in the hotel sector.
Tourism businesses like hotels rely heavily on people as they have an active role in the businesses production processes. Although some transactions (e.g. check in) are enabled by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), the majority require and rely on people. Reliance on employees is more visible in hotels due to the nature of their hybrid offerings. The delivery of hybrid offerings such as experiences requires the input and interaction of employee expertise from a variety of departments, thus forming temporary/ad hoc operational networks. These operational networks comprise of a number of employees (actors) who are associated in numerous ways such as professional, friendship, trust and so on during which they interact by exchanging information and socially construct knowledge. In addition, the distinguishing characteristics of not only the hotel sectors offerings, namely: intangibility, perishability, inseparability and heterogeneity contribute to the information and knowledge volume and content variations challenging businesses. For example, the heterogenous service interactions between different employees and customers contribute to the intensity, breadth and depth of information or knowledge.
Taking into consideration the importance of people in delivering hotel offerings and the volume of information they are exposed to and/or socially produce themselves, makes “the human mind [of network members] a direct productive force, not just a decisive element of a production system” (Castells, 1996, p. 32). However, this realisation poses significant challenges to businesses experiencing relatively high staff turnover rates just like hotels do. The situation may be exacerbated in the Northern Territory where high levels of casual employment, the remoteness of the region, internal group transfers of employees, lack of career development opportunities and so on are characteristics of the regions hotel sector.
By adopting the social constructivist view of knowledge creation, and theoretical postulates from the network theory, as well as organisational behaviour, we seek to understand the type of disruptions to hotel businesses that staff turnover creates. We particularly focus on how these disruptions affect knowledge sharing and creation among individuals and social networks.
Categories: Labour Force
We have just loaded up two publications to our main web site. These summarise findings from our telephone and mail surveys conducted over the past year or so. The first is APS final report (.pdf) – a summary of findings from the Australia Post survey of people who had left the NT. Thanks to our colleagues at the Nt Treasury who put this summary together. The second is Northern Territory population mobility survey 2006 (.pdf) which contains some findings from the telephone survey conducted with 1500 NT residents at the end of 2006. There is another document with different perspectives on that survey that was done early last year – Territory Mobility Survey: Preliminary results for the non-Indigenous population (.pdf) , but hopefully you will get some value out of the new one as well.
Links to these documents and some other publications are at http://www.cdu.edu.au/sspr/mobilityproject.htm. Looking forward to your comments.
Categories: Publishing our results
The blog has been a bit quiet in the past two weeks. I have been busy preparing for the seminar I gave last Thursday with Professor Tony Barnes looking at the Population Studies research program at Charles Darwin University, and some of the things that make the NT population interesting and important as an object of study. Over thirty people attended the seminar, including colleagues from various NT Government departments and some private sector businesses – indicating that population is important to lots of people up here. The Powerpoint slides and seminar notes are already on the CDU eb site – http://www.cdu.edu.au/sspr/seminars.html and follow the links. Note also that there are two more seminars in the Population Studies theme – one next Friday (4 April) from our PhD students and one on 18 APril about our research into reasons for coming and going given by dentists, accountants, engineers, and nurses.
As part of the build up to the seminar last week, I gave a couple of radio interviews. I have tried to summarise the flavour of those interviews in the attached document. cdupopulationresearchqa.pdf
Categories: Publishing our results
Last week I mentioned our seminar series running through March and April. We had a very interesting presentation last Friday (8 March) from Elizabeth Creed who reported on the work she has been doing with in-depth interviews of Northern Territory residents. She wanted to see why people moved to the Northern Territory and what was influencing their decisions to stay or move again. It is interesting work for us, because normally we break down quantitative data to summarise a motive for people – work, family, holiday, lifestyle etc. Elizabeth and her colleagues have been using the work of Faist (1997) that distinguishes between macro (economic conditions, housing market etc), meso (family networks, friendship networks etc) and micro (individual decisions) influences on migration. They wanted to see how well their participants (they have interviewed over 70 people) fit this model.
As a side note – we are currently looking at the relationship between in-migration to the NT and unemployment conditions in the rest of Australia. Our hypothesis is that increasing unemployment elsewhere increases immigration to the NT (which is seen as having more job opportunities), but that decreasing unemployment elsewhere (like we have now) will slow down immigration. I’ll show a pretty graph for that in a couple of weeks’ time!
Anyway, what Elizabeth found was that migration decisions are rarely the result of a single event or circumstance. People experience a combination of factors that ultimately result in them being somewhere else – often unpredictably. So there were interviewees who came to the NT (maybe for a holiday or a general ‘look around’), found a job and stayed – but they also had a job “back home” that they were quite happy with – so the ‘push-pull’ thing was more complex than you might initially think. Some interviewees moved to the NT and found, almost by conincidence, that they had extended family here. Now they have strengthened their ties with the extended family (who did not ’cause’ their original move) and so they are more embedded in the NT than the models would predict.
This stuff is consistent with what we are learning about motives to come and go from the NT. The NT (or any destination) fits a particular set of needs at a particular time. Leaving does not necessarily mean that you no longer like the NT, just that your needs have changed. In the same way, arriving doesn;t mean you have an overall preference for the NT, just that it happens to meet some set of needs at that point in time. “Settling down” is likely to be a whole other process – and there are indications that people who move a lot during their lives are a) the sort of people who are likely to wind up in the NT at some point and b) less likely to get to that “settle down” phase while they are in the NT.
Next week (20 March) I am giving a seminar outlining the overall direction of population studies research at Charles Darwin University, and giving some potted examples of the sorts of findings coming out of the research program. I’ll post my script when it is all done.
Categories: Migration motives
