Extending the social report
Regional and local authority indicators have been included in the Social Report for the first time, extending its reputation as a world-leading model.
The indicators were taken from the Ministry of Social Development’s (MSD) "Social Report 2005", which uses 42 indicators to monitor trends across 10 domains, and which together provide a picture of the overall wellbeing and quality of life in New Zealand. These indicators were then disaggregated to regional council and territorial local authority level where possible.
“We ended up getting 19 of 42 indicators to regional council level and we got 11 indicators for the majority of the territorial authorities (TA). We were able to use an extra five for the 12 big cities, so they have 16 indicators at the TA reporting level,” said Jill Bowman, Principal Analyst with MSD’s Strategic Social Policy group.
The information is published on the Social Report website and uses colour-coded maps to compare regions by indicator. Regions are shaded from dark green for those doing best in any particular indicator through to dark red for the lowest performing region for the indicator. “For some indicators, there’s not a great difference between highest and lowest. For others, even if the range of outcomes is relatively wide, New Zealand may still be doing well overall. The unemployment rate might be higher in some regions compared to other regions, for example, but New Zealand is doing well by international comparisons.”
Jill said the web format has been a successful way of presenting the regional data, and people are now requesting the information in hard-copy format. “People are finding it really useful.”
The Local Government Act 2002 requires regional and local authorities to monitor community outcomes, and Jill said the social indicators would assist them in this by providing a benchmark for measuring progress over time. “We’ve presented data for one year only so far and have used the most recent we could get. But there is a possibility of developing a time series retrospectively and into the future, because it has been so well received.”
She said the process had been a learning experience for everyone involved. “We now have a better understanding of the data available and its limitations. For the regions, we had to use census data a lot. At a national level, while we can use survey data, the samples are too small to be disaggregated to regions and the sample error rate would be too high to be able to use this data with confidence.”
The publication of the "Social Report 2005" in July marked the end point of a comprehensive round of consultation with other government agencies to see if indicators are still appropriate and to confirm what data will be available.
MSD’s Jeff Sheerin, Team Manager, Social Monitoring and Reporting, Centre for Social Research and Evaluation, said that Social Report indicators have to meet strict criteria, such as being statistically robust and replicable. He said there was a lot of information behind each indicator which has to be distilled down to a measure that gives a sense of how well we are doing. “It is a very rigorous process of double-checking and quality assurance.”
Jeff said the social indicators were also dynamic. “They can change over time to reflect new information, or different ways of collecting and analysing information. For example, the paid work indicator domain now uses median, rather than average, hourly earnings. That’s because a median, or the middle point of the income distribution, gives a better reflection of whether people are becoming better or worse off over time. If an average is used, a small group of very high income earners can skew the average, for example,” Jeff said.
Another change this year was the deletion of an indicator of ‘disability requiring assistance’. This was included in previous reports as a proxy measure of non-fatal health outcomes. The information is already captured, however, under the ‘health expectancy’ indicator, which is a combined measure of fatal and non-fatal health outcomes. The change also fits with the New Zealand Disability Strategy, which encourages a focus on the societal barriers faced by people, rather than the impairment itself
For more information, go to www.socialreport.msd.govt.nz
