Wednesday 11 December 2024
The Effect of Income on New Zealand Children’s Socio-Emotional Development:
The influence of maternal stress and children’s screen use
Dr Jaimie Monk, Motu Economic and Public Policy Research
Growing up free from the burden of poverty is linked to better socio-emotional development in children, but how poverty impacts children’s socio-emotional development is poorly understood, particularly in Aotearoa New Zealand.
This study explores the differences in child socio-emotional development between high- and low-income families and what could be causing them, with a focus on the influence of maternal stress and children’s screen use. The study uses mother-reported data from the Growing Up in New Zealand study – a longitudinal child development study following 6,852 children born in 2009/10. A combination of multivariate cross-sectional and fixed-effects regression models, alongside Gelbach decompositions, are used to examine the association between income and child socio-emotional development at ages 2, 4.5, and 8-years old.
Overall, children in higher-income households had fewer reported behavioural problems than children in lower-income households, even after sociodemographic and parenting differences were accounted for. In contrast, there was little difference in reported prosocial behaviour among children from different income groups.
The associations between income and behaviour problems were greater during the preschool waves than at 8-years old. During the preschool years it was factors associated with the mother-child relationship such as maternal stress, parenting style, reading to children and screen use which explained most of the difference in reported behaviour problems across the income groups.
The study underscores the importance of investing in children’s development in their early years. It suggests that investments focused on parental wellbeing may improve child behavioural inequities.
Jaimie Monk is a fellow at Motu Economic and Public Policy Research. Her research interests include child poverty, family wellbeing, housing, children’s technology use and behavioural economics for public policy.
Jaimie is an applied microeconomist who is passionate about utilising longitudinal data for policy development in Aotearoa New Zealand and enjoys working across disciplines to understand complex policy issues. She has a PhD in Public Policy from Te Herenga Waka | Victoria University of Wellington.
Wednesday 13 November 2024
Is the current approach to H. pylori testing & treatment equitable?
Dr Andrea Teng, Department of Public Health, University of Otago
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Associate Professor Melissa McLeod, Te Rōpū Rangahau Hauora a Eru Pōmare, University of Otago
There are up to sixfold differences in gastric cancer mortality by ethnicity in Aotearoa New Zealand, and H. pylori is the major modifiable risk factor. This study investigated whether current H. pylori testing and treatment approaches are equitable.
This retrospective cohort analysis of linked administrative health data, linked laboratory testing data and pharmacy dispensing to the Northern region health user population dataset (1.9 million) 2015–2018. Ethnic differences were examined in rates of H. pylori testing, infection, treatment, and retesting, adjusted for age, sex, and calendar year.
Ethnic inequities were present across the clinical pathway. Compared to sole-European, testing rates were lowest in Māori and Pacific, and highest in Middle-Eastern/Latin American/African (MELAA) and Asian. Positivity rates were highest in MELAA and Pacific, followed by Asian, and Māori. Treatment rates were similar for Asian, MELAA, and Māori compared to sole-European, but lower in Pacific. Māori and Pacific were half as likely to be retested as sole-European.
Despite higher prevalence of H. pylori and gastric cancer, Māori and Pacific are relatively under-served, with lower rates of testing and treatment than sole-European. Improved and consistently applied guidelines are needed, and an equity-focused test and treat programme is likely to be particularly beneficial for Māori and Pacific, to address existing inequities. This study was funded by the Healthier Lives National Science Challenge.
Andrea Teng is a Public Health Physician and Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Public Health, University of Otago. Andrea’s research focus is on the prevention of non-communicable disease inequities, with a focus on stomach cancer H. pylori test and treat approaches, and fiscal policies in the Pacific for improved nutrition. Andrea is a member of the VHIN Executive and has led several projects using StatsNZ IDI.
Melissa McLeod (Ngāi Tahu) is a Public Health Physician & Associate Professor working at Te Rōpū Rangahau Hauora a Eru Pōmare, University of Otago. She is a Fellow of the New Zealand College of Public Health Medicine and a member of Te ORA (Māori Medical Practitioners’ Association). Melissa’s research interests include Māori health, epidemiology, and investigation and elimination of ethnic health inequalities in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Wednesday 9 October 2024
TIAKI: Community-wellbeing for whānau with lived experience of prison
Associate Professor Paula Toko King – Te Aupōuri, Te Rarawa, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Whātua, Waikato Tainui, Ngāti Maniapoto (MBChB, DCH, MPH, PhD, FNZCPHM)
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Associate Professor Ruth Cunningham (Tangata Tiriti) MBChB, MPH, FNZCPHM, PhD
Background and aims: The mass imprisonment of Māori in their own lands impacts on the health and wellbeing of not only those who are imprisoned but their whānau and communities. Community re-entry is an important opportunity to address the adverse impacts of imprisonment on individuals and whānau and will be an important part of the transition away from the system of mass imprisonment. TIAKI – meaning ‘to care’ – is a Kaupapa Māori mixed-methods research project that focuses on the lived experiences of Māori adults who have been imprisoned, and their whānau, to identify pathways supporting positive community re-entry wellbeing.
Methods: We are resourcing and supporting whānau with lived experience of imprisonment to be their own researchers (kairangahau) to develop strategies for self-determined pathways supporting positive community re-entry wellbeing. Alongside this we are using routinely collected Government data linked in the IDI to understand community entry pathways for Māori and the factors which influence wellbeing outcomes after release, informed by kairangahau with lived experience. We have developed a Tikanga and Māori Data Sovereignty framework as a basis for our research process, informing the way we prioritise lived experience and use data collected in circumstances of coercion.
Results: Our presentation will focus on the development and implementation of our Tikanga and Māori Data Sovereignty framework, as a method for the ethical use of Government data collected in circumstances of coercion. We will also present some early results including the results of an audit of the quality of ethnicity data held by Corrections that demonstrates systemic undercounting of Māori in prisons.
Conclusion: Data collected by Government provides a resource for holding Government to account. Our framework and research process provides a method for using these data in way that prioritises the voices of those whose data has been collected and aims to use these data for positive transformational change.
Paula is a Public Health Medicine Specialist and Research Associate Professor based in Te Rōpū Rangahau Hauora a Eru Pōmare / the Māori Health Research Centre at the University of Otago Wellington. In addition to Kaupapa Māori epidemiological expertise, Paula is experienced in undertaking qualitative research and ethical co designing with mokopuna Māori and their communities. Her research areas of focus involve tāngata whenua sovereignty rights to health, impacts of racism on health, disability issues for Māori, impacts of youth justice residences and prisons on Māori health outcomes, and realising participatory rights for mokopuna Māori who are state care-experienced.
Ruth is a public health physician and epidemiologist working in population mental health and health justice. She is an Associate Professor of Public Health at the University of Otago Wellington and also works as a Public Health Physician in Population Health Gain at Te Whatu Ora / Health NZ. Her research work is focused on the most marginalised groups, particularly people with experience of mental health and substance use conditions, including working with lived experience and Indigenous researchers to explore intersecting experiences of discrimination. Ruth has worked extensively with linked administrative data, including health and other government services data. Her current research focus is supporting Kaupapa Māori research on pathways to health and wellbeing after imprisonment and detention in youth justice facilities.
Wednesday 11 September 2024
Enhancing public research on social data through data synthesis
Alex Wang, Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment
Artificial Intelligence (AI) relies on two key components: data and model. Traditionally, the focus has been on advancing algorithms, resulting in models are getting deeper and bigger. However, a shift in research emphasis from models to data has led to the rise of Data-Centric AI. When working with real-world data, challenges often arise, including the need for large quantities of data, dealing with biased or imbalanced data, and navigating privacy concerns that limit data accessibility. Synthetic data offers a powerful solution to these challenges by augmenting when more data is needed, debiasing when data is imbalanced or biased, and representing real data when there is a privacy concern.
While research into synthetic data dates back to the 1990s, recent advancements in deep generative models have significantly improved the quality and scalability of synthetic tabular data. In this sense, we will explore the concept of synthetic data, discuss advanced techniques for generating tabular data, and share real-world examples of its applications within New Zealand government sector. We will demonstrate how different levels of synthetic data, tailored for balanced privacy and utility, can be customized for various tasks. Our discussion will highlight how Data-Centric AI contributes to social good by making data more accessible, diverse and secure.
Alex Wang is Data Science Manager at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and a Research Associate at Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington. He is a trained statistician and data scientist with expertise in data analytics and machine learning for tabular data. His research interests include tabular data synthesis, multimodal data-centric AI and explainable AI, with applications in healthcare and social data.
Wednesday 14 August 2024
Examining the wellbeing impacts of urban regeneration using administrative data
Linda Kirkpatrick, New Zealand Policy Research Institute
New Zealand faces substantial housing challenges with a housing crisis brought on by housing shortages, rising housing costs, poor quality stock, and overcrowding issues. Kāinga Ora is the primary government agency responsible for social housing and urban development, and has further plans to increase the housing supply by 35,000 homes over the next 15 years, with 50% of these homes to be delivered in Auckland. These investments aim to improve wellbeing, liveability, social connections, and place-based identity through the provision of affordable homes, shared community spaces, and active transport options to support access to employment, amenities, and services. By developing or regenerating urban areas that people live in (“urban regeneration”), there is the potential to improve health and wider social outcomes in affected communities. Urban regeneration has the potential to increase the housing supply and improve the quality of the current housing stock, thereby having positive long-term impacts on community wellbeing.
This research uses detailed housing intensification data from Kāinga Ora to assess the social return-on-investment, and measures the wellbeing impact of urban regeneration using administrative data and Treasury’s Living Standards Framework, supplemented by the New Zealand Index of Multiple Deprivation. Wellbeing outcomes of urban regeneration are grouped across:
- human capital – education and labour market outcomes;
- physical and mental health; and
- crime and safety.
These outcomes are constructed using administrative data from the Integrated Data Infrastructure, which is administered by StatsNZ.
Linda Kirkpatrick is a Senior Research Officer at the New Zealand Policy Research Institute. She uses SQL and R to provide an evidence base for policy-related research using population-wide administrative data from the Integrated Data Infrastructure. Her research areas of focus include labour market and health outcomes, with a particular interest in minority and refugee populations. She specialises in research dissemination to convey findings in layman’s terms, as accessible as possible to the general public, such as infographics, posters, and dashboards.
Wednesday 10 July 2024
Reducing Youth Reoffending in South Auckland: Findings from New Zealand’s First Social Impact Bond
Eyal Apatov, Oranga Tamariki
Social Impact Bonds (or Social Bonds) are a type of pay-for-success contracting approach, where the government contracts private investors to fund a social service (via a service provider), paying the investors back – plus a return – only if pre-determined outcomes set in the contract are met. Globally, nearly 300 Social Bonds have been recorded across 38 countries, addressing issues in areas such as labour market, education, homelessness, mental health, and youth recidivism.
The Reducing Youth Reoffending in South Auckland Social Bond pilot (SB pilot) is the only example to date of operating an intervention using the ‘bond approach’ in New Zealand. With the goal of reducing the frequency and severity of offending, the intervention was delivered by the Genesis Youth Trust (GYT) between 2017 and 2023, using funding from various non-government investors.
This talk summarises the findings from the latest Oranga Tamariki evaluation of the SB pilot. Using a Nearest Neighbour Matching approach on data sourced from Police and the Youth Justice Minimum National Dataset (YJMNDS), the evaluation’s goal was to estimate the impact of the SB pilot on the reoffending outcomes of participants.
This evaluation complements two previous evaluations commissioned by Oranga Tamariki and focused on the operation of the pilot, as well as the outcomes as perceived by participants, their whānau, and other stakeholders.
Eyal Apatov is Senior Analyst at the Oranga Tamariki Evidence Centre. Eyal’s research focuses on applying quantitative methods to better understand the causal impacts of government policies and interventions (or lack thereof).
Wednesday 12 June 2024
Respiratory illness insights from Flutracking participatory survey data
Emily Harvey, Te Pūnaha Matatini
During the Elimination Phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in Aotearoa NZ, a crucial piece of information we needed was an estimate of how many people in the community had new onset of symptoms consistent with COVID-19 at any given time. What we found was that almost all of Aotearoa NZ’s respiratory illness surveillance system is focused on monitoring severe illness, and only the weekly Flutracking participatory survey provided the information we needed.
This talk showcased some of the ways our analysis of Flutracking data was invaluable to support the COVID-19 response, argued that this form of participatory surveillance needs to be a critical part of our respiratory disease surveillance system in future, and outlined potential other uses for this type of data, including for estimating the burden of respiratory illness in different communities.
Dr Emily Harvey is a senior researcher at M.E Research and a Principal Investigator with Te Pūnaha Matatini (Centre of Research Excellence for complex systems research). Emily’s research interests can be broadly described as using mathematical modelling and data analytics to study complex economic, environmental, cultural, and social systems. Emily co-led the ‘network- and individual-based modelling team’ within Covid-19 Modelling Aotearoa, 2020–2023, and worked directly with government to support COVID-19 response and planning.
Wednesday 8 May 2024
Improving health through housing: the Healthy Homes Initiative
Ellie Johnson, University of Otago Wellington
New Zealand housing stock is notorious for its dampness, mould, injury-causing hazards, and overcrowding. Such housing is detrimental to health and is a significant driver of health inequities. In response to high incidence of housing-related illness in children, the Healthy Homes Initiative (HHI) was established. Based on world-leading research from He Kāinga Oranga, the HHI is a government-funded, multi-component housing intervention programme.
This talk discussed the evaluation of the HHI programme using the Statistics NZ Integrated Data Infrastructure, presented statistical modelling which showed that improvements in housing results not only improved health outcomes for participants of the HHI but also had potential health benefits for their household members. Partnership with community HHI providers and their role in project design and data collection were highlighted as particularly important.
Using the IDI is a game-changer for housing researchers, allowing us to generate powerful evidence showing how community-led housing interventions are improving health. This research, combined with important qualitative evidence, paints a rich picture of the role of housing and importance of continued government backing for such programmes as the HHI.
Ellie Johnson is an Applied Statistician and PhD Student with an interest in housing policy. She has worked at the University of Otago, Wellington since 2019 and is currently completing a PhD within He Kāinga Oranga under the supervision of Professor Nevil Pierse and Dr Elinor Chisholm. Her current work explores the impact of housing on health and wellbeing using the Integrated Data Infrastructure using data from the Healthy Homes Initiative.
Wednesday 10 April 2024
An Interaction Network for Simulating Contagion in Aotearoa
Dion O’Neale, University of Auckland
Interaction networks are important for modelling, and understanding, a range of processes; spread of infectious disease being one recent high-profile application. In order to provide contagion modelling advice to decision makers, as part of the government response to COVID-19 in Aotearoa New Zealand, we have used a range of data sources to build the Populated Aotearoa Interaction Network (PAIN).
The PAIN is built as four layers (dwelling, workplace, education, and community) – each derived from empirical data. Much of this data is drawn from Statistics New Zealand’s Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI). In order to accurately represent the important topological features of the network of interactions we convert the microdata into a synthetic population that can be used with a network-based contagion process in order to simulate various scenarios involving spread of COVID-19, including estimating the effects of a range of interventions.
Using a network based contagion model allows for capturing infectious disease dynamics that are not possible to represent well in traditional contagion models. It is also well suited to including equity relevant effects in contagion modelling, such as ability to work from home or household size.
Dr Dion O’Neale is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Auckland and Lead Analyst at Nicholson Consulting. His work focuses on how network science approaches can be used to represent and analyse patterns and heterogeneities in social systems. He has applied these methods in a variety of contexts; from social networks built from data from obsidian artefacts from pre European Aotearoa, through to population-level networks for Aotearoa built from IDI data.
Wednesday 13 March 2024
Estimating the Effect of Labour Market Entry Conditions on Income:
The role of family background
Amelia Guha
Economists and policymakers alike have long been concerned about the consequences of interruptions of the initial process of career progression due to graduating during recession. Increasing evidence in literature suggests that graduating from university in a poor economy can have substantial long-term effects on the earnings of college graduates.
In this presentation, I provide novel evidence, supporting the role of family characteristics on children’s labour market outcomes. We study the short-term and long-term effects of graduating during adverse labour market conditions on income. In line with the literature, we see negative effects on earnings during the initial year of labour market entry. The effect becomes insignificant after the first year.
However, when we change our identification approach where we run our analysis using sibling fixed effects regression, we find that unemployment rates do not matter. Once we control for family background heterogeneity, labour market conditions do not matter for earnings. These results suggest that for a small country like New Zealand, networking and family connections can act as an insurance during economic shocks.
Amelia Guha is a microeconomist with an interest in labour economics. She has worked at the NZ Productivity Commission, and recently defended her PhD thesis at the University of Otago. Her current work includes using the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) to study the link between graduation timing and economic outcomes of students. Other areas of research include the effects of networking and family background on earnings, effects of relative income of households on share of risky assets, and firm performances in New Zealand.
Wednesday 14 February 2024
Impact of illness and disability on whānau and family members in Aotearoa
Lisa Underwood, COMPASS Research Centre
As global populations age and multi-generational family living increases, more individuals are likely to be impacted by illness and disability within their family. Our recent findings using nationwide administrative data indicate that in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ), high levels of family-based support are needed among Pacific Peoples, multi-generation families and those living in high levels of deprivation. This suggests potential gains from culturally appropriate: family-based preventative strategies that address modifiable risk factors; family-wide health screening/assessment; and interventions that include the whole family.
Lisa Underwood is a health researcher with a background in psychology. She works for COMPASS at the University of Auckland, as a Senior Research Fellow. Lisa spends most of her working week at the Stats NZ Datalab, obtaining and managing data sourced from the IDI. Currently working on chronic conditions among NZ whānau, she is interested in developing projects on the impacts of health, disability, neurodevelopmental disorders, mental health, and substance use on children, carers and family wellbeing.
