Reporting approaches used for indicators

The Social Report provides analysis of changes over time to help summarise outcomes for indicators. Some indicators have more than one measure. For example, the voter turnout indicator has two measures – voter turnout in general elections and voter turnout in local authority elections.

The following approaches are used in the report:

1.Recent-change
The change between the two most recently available data points (up until 2014) for each measure.

2.Medium-term-change;
The change between the most recent data point (up until 2014) and a data point in the period 2005–2008. This time period was chosen because of the availability of data from key surveys including the New Zealand Health Survey (2006/2007), the New Zealand General Social Survey (2008), the Household Economic Survey (2007), and the 2006 Census.

For a small number of indicators, recent-change and medium-term-change are the same period, owing to the nature of the data collection (eg the 2006 and 2013 Censuses reflect both recent-change and medium-term-change).

In some cases, the data is averaged over the three years to avoid problems with small sample sizes.

3. Trend
Time series analysis is provided, where available, for each indicator.