Domains and social indicators

The Social Report 2010 presents 43 social wellbeing indicators in 10 outcome "domains" or areas of people's lives such as health, education, standard of living and safety. These are listed in Table IN1. The desired outcome statements for each domain are "ideal" outcomes, rather than specific targets.

The outcome domains are interconnected. Doing well or poorly in one domain is likely to affect performance in other domains. For example, poor educational outcomes are associated with higher levels of unemployment and lower incomes, which in turn are linked to housing affordability problems, poorer health and lower levels of life satisfaction.

Social indicators are statistical measures that can be repeated over time to illustrate changes in the quality of life or social wellbeing.

Some indicators measure change in the outcome of interest directly (eg median hourly earnings in the Paid Work domain). Others are known to be good predictors of later outcomes (eg cigarette smoking, in the Health domain, is a predictor of later health problems).

The social report indicators are a mixture of objective measures (eg obesity, assault mortality) and subjective measures that reflect how people feel about a situation (eg contact with family and friends, overall life satisfaction).

The key feature of a social indicator is that any change can be interpreted as progress towards, or a movement away from, the desired outcome. This distinguishes social indicators from other social statistics that cannot be interpreted this way. For example, while a rise in the median age of parents living with dependent children is a useful statistic for describing social change, the change itself cannot be said to be necessarily "good" or "bad".