Appendix 1
Changes to The Social Report 2005
No changes have been made to the outcome domains used in this year’s edition of the social report. Three key changes have been made to the indicators used in the report and these are detailed in Table AP1.1.
Table AP1.1 Changes to the indicators in The Social Report 2005
| Change |
Rationale |
| "Disability requiring assistance" deleted from the Health domain |
"Disability requiring assistance" was included in previous reports as a proxy measure of non-fatal health outcomes. This information is already captured, however, under the "health expectancy" indicator which is a combined measure of fatal and non-fatal health outcomes. The New Zealand Disability Strategy also encourages a focus on the societal barriers faced by people with impairments, rather than the impairment itself. Note that information on the prevalence of disability, and the outcomes of people with disabilities relative to the non-disabled population, is provided in the People section of the report. |
"Average hourly earnings" in the Paid Work domain
replaced with an indicator of "median hourly earnings" |
"Median hourly earnings" is a better measure of the experience of the middle-ranked earner as it is less subject to movements that are specific to the upper and lower ends of the earning distribution. |
| "Confirmed notifications of child abuse and neglect" in the Safety domain replaced with an indicator of "intentional injury child mortality rate (five-year average)" |
"Confirmed notifications" is based on the number of children assessed as abused or neglected following a notification to the Department of Child, Youth and Family Services. Changes in this indicator do not necessarily reflect changes in the underlying rate of child abuse. They could, instead, reflect changes in the level of resourcing for the Department, changes in public attitudes to the reporting of child abuse, or changes in administrative recording practices. |
A number of other minor changes have been made to the report.
The "absence of corruption" indicator has been re-named "perceived corruption" to better reflect what it actually measures, but no change has been made to the indicator itself.
Four of the indicators in The Social Report 2004 were based on data from the Ministry of Social Development’s Social Wellbeing Survey 2004 ("satisfaction with work-life balance", "satisfaction with leisure time", "trust in others" and "loneliness"). For the 2005 report we have used data from the Quality of Life in New Zealand's Largest Cities Survey 2004 to report on these indicators. We have also re-named the indicator "satisfaction with leisure" to "satisfaction with leisure time" to better reflect what is actually asked of survey respondents.
In The Social Report 2004, the "drinking water quality" indicator was based on the 1995 Drinking Water Standards of New Zealand . These standards were revised in 2000, and have been used in the 2005 report as the basis for reporting on water quality.
These modifications build on a series of incremental changes that were introduced in previous editions of the social report. Most notable was the addition to the 2004 report of both a Leisure and Recreation domain, and a number of new indicators based on people’s perceptions of their own lives.
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