Aboriginal survey, New South Wales and South Australia, 1965: File m

non-probability sample<br /> <br /> The New South Wales survey was aimed at covering the State as a whole, except for Sydney. For reasons of time, costs and mobility of the population, no sampling of dwellings throughout the State was attempted. The method of selection was first to ascertain, within an area centred in a country town, the number of houses occupied by Aborigines. The houses were classified according to tenure under which the land on which they stood was held. As nearly as possible, one-third of dwellings in each category was then chosen for interview. Where there were two or three dwellings in a small township, one was selected for interview. The aim was to achieve a fairly representative section within each of the five area divisions. Attention was also paid to overall numbers, as far as they could be established, living in the different land tenure situations. Care was taken to avoid country towns which had, in the recent past, been centres of demonstrations, partly to avoid suspicion being cast on the researchers enquiries and mainly because the risk of understatement was preferred to that of exaggeration.<br /> <br /> In the South Australian component selection of areas was determined largely by locations where assistance from the Departments of Geography and Social Studies of the University of Adelaide was available. There was, nonetheless, good reason for selecting the Eyre Peninsula and some hinterland townships tied by rail or road to the main centres, because the results shed some light on the effects of Aboriginal living standards of urbanisation in a newly industrialised region. Interviews were conducted with twenty-four non-Aboriginal families living nextdoor or adjacent to Aborigines who had been interviewed.