Four weeks left to have your say in Gen26

Gen26, the national survey of Australian Jewish life, will close on November 24, with researchers urging those who have put it off to take part in the next four weeks.

With the survey nine weeks into fieldwork, and JCA research consultant David Graham said thousands had responded so far. “We know we can get large samples, but it’s about representativeness,” Graham said. “We want to make sure we’ve covered a representative sample of the adult community. There are certain groups that are sort of low-hanging fruit, easy to get, keen and ready to answer surveys, and there are other groups that are a lot harder to get.”

Those harder-to-reach groups include adults in their 20s and early 30s — past university, not yet settled with children — who are less likely to be synagogue members or on communal mailing lists. “Motivating them to commit what is for many up to 40 minutes to complete a survey, for people in their 20s that’s a big commitment these days,” he said.

Russian-speaking and Hebrew-speaking Israeli households are also under-represented relative to their numbers, and researchers are visiting aged care facilities with volunteers and iPads to help residents without internet access complete it.

Graham said the difficulty was not unique to Gen26. “You call them hard-to-reach groups, and they’re not just hard for us. ABS struggles with them for the national census,” he said. Young adults were absent from the lists researchers could access precisely because they were not synagogue members or donors, though they were reachable on social media.