As-grown ZnO typically exhibits n-type conductivity and the difficulty of synthesizing p-type ZnO for the realization of ZnO-based optoelectronic devices is mainly due to the compensation effect of a large background n-type carrier concentration. The cause of this self-compensation effect has not been conclusively identified although oxygen vacancies, zinc interstitials and hydrogen have been suggested. In this work, typical n-type ZnO thin films were prepared by sputtering and investigated using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy and time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectroscopy to gain an insight on the possible cause of the self-compensation effect. The analyses found that the native defect that most likely behaved as the donor was zinc interstitial but some contribution of n-type conductivity could also come from the electronegative carbonates or hydrogen carbonates incorporated in the ZnO thin films. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.