MONITORING THE CHANGING SOCIAL CONDITIONS OF NEW ZEALANDERS.

• Author: Crothers, Charles
• Position: Statistical Data Included

Abstract

An agenda for developing a systematic, comprehensive and coherent set of annual social indicators using available statistics is advanced. Such indicators would allow the changing social conditions of New Zealanders to be regularly monitored. A preliminary attempt is essayed to assemble and display such indicators using the more readily available of such statistics. Trends are identified and the theoretical and methodological foundations are laid for the possible construction of interrelated models, which would show how different domains of social life influence each other. It is advocated that institutional arrangements be set up to provide adequately contextualised interpretative accounts of such time-series, including attention to interrelationships amongst domains and policy implications.

INTRODUCTION

"Social indicators" are institutionalised measures of social well-being or quality of life. These have relevance to policy, generally through alerting policy analysts to deteriorating social conditions or in measuring broad impacts of policies. They are designed to both offset and complement economic indicators that measure the aggregate well-being of a country's economy. From the 1960s a "social indicators movement", of social scientists and policy analysts interested in promoting social indicators, has agitated for more systematic development of social indicators and for policy makers to pay them more heed in their policy considerations.

The social indicators movement has both risen and then languished in New Zealand. An early conference endeavoured to push the concept under the sponsorship of New Zealand's UNESCO Commission (Cant et al. 1979), and its later fruits came with a one-off Statistics Department survey (1984). Further influence came with some attention from the Social Monitoring Group (SMG) of the New Zealand Planning Council (which gave rise to the "From Birth to Death" series of publications, of which Tracking Social Change in New Zealand: Birth to Death IV (Davey 1998) is the most recent). However, no system of social indicators has become institutionalised, and the longer-term effect of work on social indicators has been apparently minimal.

Certainly, some "social reporting" continues, largely by virtue of the efforts of people involved in these earlier efforts. However, this work either takes a quite broad focus on changes in aspects of social structure or takes a quite narrow focus on the harder end of social indicators: health, income and poverty. Although some published material is of particular pertinence (especially Davey 1998 and Thorns and Sedgwick 1997) these publications only partially perform the tasks of a social monitoring report, as they have wider concerns. A particular difficulty is that publication of large reports such as these can suffer from lack of timeliness although, impressively, Davey includes 1996 census data only two years later, while Thorns and Sedgwick include data series up to 1994 in their 1997 publication.

Some effort in social monitoring has recently been made by particular agencies in New Zealand. The most advanced system is that being conducted by the New Zealand Health Information Service, which is developing a National Health Index, Medical Warning System and National Minimum Data Set (see http://www.nzhis.govt.nz/DataDictionary).

Internationally there also seems to be a more widespread interest arising in social indicators and monitoring. A sweep around appropriate websites reveals work being carried out in several UN or UN-related agencies (most notably the Human Development Report Office) and other units at national and regional levels. For example, UNICEF issues "Statistical Profiles" for the countries of Asia and Pacific (and other regions), which include for each country: total population, children, annual births, infant mortality, Gross National Product per capita, proportion of under-five children who are underweight and proportion of children reaching grade 5). The Parliamentary Library of the Parliament of Australia has "monthly Economic and Social Indicators" (although this seemed confined to population data in 1999). Yet another example is the website of the Durban Metro Council, which lists a range of goals and then provides definitions and discussions of each of these together with a research programme for their regular measurement. By now, considerable international expertise is building up for the carrying out of social monitoring.

Finally, it is particularly appropriate to revisit the topic of social indicators given the commitment of the recently elected Labour-Alliance Coalition Government to improving the database for policy. This paper provides a broad canvas of information with the aim of generating discussion on these issues. To guide the reader in considering this information, I provide a review of recent developments in the area and of the methodological issues.

In this paper I review some of the readily available sources of information in New Zealand that might be built into a system of regularly examined social indicators. I also attempt to build a more systematic domain within which these might be fitted. In order to provide a glimpse of the utility of such a system of indicators, I provide a sweep across some of the available social statistics in New Zealand that might be pressed into service in providing ongoing social indicators. I also attempt to draw attention to where there are major gaps in available data. I concentrate on those statistics that generally are available on an annual basis and so can measure the changing social condition of New Zealanders at a reasonably frequent interval. In contrast, census and other less-frequently-collected social data are better used to measure the more slowly changing "social structure". I argue that more systematic attention should be paid to these available social indicators, but I also will try to assess the adequacy of this approach as opposed to the need for fresh collection through surveys of quality-of-life information.

There are major limitations on reporting such a broad exercise within the confines of a paper. Here, I merely seek to draw attention to the broader project. The presentation of the data alone would require much more space than is available, let alone the disaggregated versions of such time-series, the necessary detailed discussions of their validity and reliability, and the considerable need for nuanced and contextualised interpretations. Moreover, for the broader project to be carried out, much wider networks of researchers and policy analysts would need to be involved.

In most OECD countries (see Vogel 1994), an annual household survey of the social conditions of the population is at the centre of the national system of social reporting. I take it that there is not the will amongst the political, governmental, social policy or social science communities in New Zealand to sustain such an ongoing social survey that will carry subjective (as well as some respondent-reported objective) social indicator questions on a regular, preferably annual, basis. If there were such a will, such a survey would have developed, after its abortive first attempt (Statistics Department 1984). This is unfortunate, as such an annual survey would be a very sound and central backbone to the New Zealand system of social statistics.

Fortunately, until recently (to 1998) there has been a very thorough annual Household Economic Survey(2) (HES) in New Zealand, whose potential for piggy-back carrying of subjective indicator data-collection instruments has been explored from time to time. Indeed, the potential of the HES for working up further social indicators still needs to be thoroughly explored, especially to see if the ad hoc surveys now being commissioned by various government departments might not gain from being included in a more comprehensive and regular system of data collection. Such a regular survey would enable the monitoring of more subjective states of New Zealanders, which at present is left mainly to highly episodic, media-driven, private sector surveys, as well as whatever can be gleaned from more academic survey series, such as the New Zealand Election Survey (see Vowles 1995), World Values Survey and the International Social Science Programme (ISSP) hosted at Massey University. Whereas the former is still continuing, albeit dependent on continuing funding from Foundation for Research Science & Technology, the latter appears to have been discontinued since 1996.

REQUISITE METHODOLOGICAL PROPERTIES FOR SOCIAL INDICATOR DATA

The data assembled in this exercise fit within a particular methodological framework, which I will outline below. The literature discusses many of these issues in great detail. Annual social indicators should have some of the following methodological characteristics:

* Relevance/validity;

* Reliability;

* Cultural appropriateness;

* Timeliness;

* Relationship to the "population at risk";

* Potential for "disaggregability"; and

* Potential for multi-variate analysis.

Relevance and validity are conveyed in the choice of measures within an appropriate theoretical framework. This is developed in the next section, where I lay out some conceptual possibilities. Reliability refers to the accuracy of the data, and the procedures through which they are collected. Reliability is not a major problem with most of the measures reported here, which come from quite impeccable official sources. However, users of these data series need to be very familiar with the local methodological literature surrounding each data series.

Social indicators have to mean much the same thing to different cultural groupings: for example, non-religious people might very well not value a greater opportunity to participate in church services. So indicators need to be robust across different groupings and not reflect...