Timeframe
2004–2010
Funding
Foundation for Research, Science, and Technology
COMPASS staff
Peter Davis
Roy Lay-Yee
Andrew Sporle
Mark Wheldon
Gerard Cotterell
Stephen McTaggart
Martin von Randow
Collaborators
University of Auckland
Alastair Scott
John Huakau
Massey University
Cynthia Kiro
University of Otago Wellington
Tony Blakely
University of Otago Christchurch
Gabrielle Hyde
David Fergusson
Sue Milligan
Chris Errington
Auckland University of Technology
Charles Crothers
Statistics New Zealand
Pat Coope
Angela Fabian
Independent
Mervyl McPherson
Description
The principal goal of this research programme was to develop ways to examine and monitor social and economic determinants of family and whānau wellbeing, and how these changed over the 1981–2006 period. Census data were used to investigate these and a lot of the early work went into making the initially five data sets (with the 2006 Census added later) compatible with each other in terms of variable construction and how questions were asked. This was a period in which the measurement and interpretation of some concepts changed significantly, especially ethnicity and educational qualifications. Other items were not asked at every census, such as smoking status, which was only asked in 1981, 1996, 2001, and 2006. Informally known as the Family, Whānau, and Wellbeing Project (FWWP), this study drew on more than $135 million of data collection, and assessed the compatibility of and trends observed over 6 five-yearly censuses.
Using census unit record data enabled us to take advantage of StatsNZ’s already implemented groupings of “families” and “households”, and to focus analysis on the different types of these that it recognised. For income-based measures we used the reported medians of band categories and calculated equivalised values based on the number of adults and children in each family or household unit (Jensen Equivalisation). Most of the other indicators were based on the presence of “at least one parent” with the item of interest, or simply “at least one adult” in family and household types without children.
The FWWP also explored the feasibility of monitoring the impact of social policy events on different groups in the population, and through the resulting report provided an invaluable source of information for considering future public policy and simulating expected impacts on society.
A number of publications resulted directly from the FWWP, including the just mentioned report, a report on the construction of the different indicators of wellbeing, a report on the efforts to ensure compatibility among the different census data sets, and three analytical outputs: one on the entire population, one breaking it down by the educational qualifications of parents, and one focused specifically on Māori whānau. The whole population analysis was also updated to include the 2013 Census when it became available for research, but no further updates have been undertaken.