Income inequality and opportunities among immigrants in BC

Hey guys,

This is a really well-thought out question Cyrile, I'm glad you posted it. A lot of good ideas being floated around.

I don't have a lot of time so I'll revisit this asap, but one thing that strikes me as potentially confounding is the use of terms like "impoverished" and "poor". Some respondents might be unwilling to reveal previous economic hardships. While it does get us straight to the point of whether or not they felt they were poor before coming to the country, we may be sacrificing some of the survey's internal validity by using those specific terms. The problem is the alternative- using a scale "on a scale of 1 to 7, how wealthy were you before you came to Canada" is ordinal and doesn't tell us much more information about whether or not they were poor before coming here. We could try and define those terms within the survey, but it's equally frustrating.

It's just something to consider when we're coming up with these sorts of questions.

As an addition, when doing the 'regions' it might be just a bit more relevant to Vancouver to do something more like this:

(1) North America/Caribbean (2) South America (3) Western Europe (4) Eastern Europe (5) North Africa/Middle East, (7) Sub-Saharan Africa (6) South Asia (7) East Asia (8) Southeast Asia & Pacific Islands (8) Australia/New Zealand

It's a little more complicated and could do with a bit more refining, but the clusters allow for a bit more flexibility in reported regions and a wider breadth of diverse responses. Alternatively:

(1) North America/Caribbean (2) South America (3) Europe (5) Africa (6) Asia/Pacific (7) Australia/New Zealand

Collapses them simply into smaller generalized geographic regions. This has the downside of eliminating the distinction in Europe (which is significant economically), but since in the original no such other distinctions were made elsewhere in the world and people will likely have conflicting ideas of what is now East anyway (there might be some variance for instance from people in places like Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary in reporting themselves as "Eastern Europe"). As I understand it, we'd want to be making that distinction to get a better idea of economics. However this simpler version keeps a rough geographic parallel to the continents and is pretty intuitive for people to respond to.

But I digress. Feel free to shoot these down if they're not good, and I look forward to revisiting this, it's a very promising idea for our survey!!