Consistency of ancestry reporting between parents and children in the 1986 census

A question on ancestry was asked for the first time in the 1986 Population Census. This paper examines the consistency of the responses about ancestry reported for parents and their children. The level of consistency was more than 90 per cent when both parents were of the same ancestry; when parents were of different or mixed ancestries, the level of consistency was lower. It was estimated that about 75 per cent of all dependent children had an ancestry response consistent with that of the parent or parents with whom they lived.