Towards New Indicators of Disadvantage Project: Bulletin 2: Deprivation in Australia
An article in an earlier issue of the SPRC Newsletter described the Left Out and Missing Out (LOMO): Towards New Indicators of Disadvantage project and presented results on the essentials of life. The project is funded by the Australian Research Council Linkage Grant Scheme and is based on a collaboration between the SPRC and our Industry Partners Mission Australia, the Brotherhood of St Laurence, ACOSS and Anglicare, Diocese of Sydney. The research has generated new nationwide data that is being used to identify who is deprived (‘missing out’) and excluded (‘left out’) from the benefits associated with Australia’s current period of extended economic growth and rising incomes.
The data has been produced by two surveys conducted in 2006. The first was a national postal survey of 6 000 adult Australians drawn at random from the electoral rolls. This was supplemented by a second survey targeted at those who used selected welfare services provided by the Industry Partner agencies. Both surveys were conducted over a three-month period in mid-2006. Welfare service clients were asked to complete a shortened version of the main survey when they accessed services - almost none of those approached refused to participate. The first (postal sample) was designed to build, for the first time, a comprehensive national picture of the extent and nature of deprivation and social exclusion in Australia. The second (client sample) is significant because the most vulnerable people are generally under-represented in postal surveys, and also because we wanted to find out more about the kinds of problems faced by welfare service clients, who are by definition doing it tough.
As explained in the earlier article, 2 704 people responded to the postal survey (a response rate of about 48 per cent), while 673 completed the shorter client survey. Further analysis indicates that the postal sample is reasonably representative of the general population, although it contains more people over 50 than the population, whereas the client sample is dominated by younger people (under 30), because these are the age groups at which the services that were included are targeted. Together, the two surveys provide a very rich source of new data that are being analysed to gain a better understanding of the kinds of problems faced by those who have been left out and are missing out - those that the benefits of economic progress have thus far, failed to reach.
Towards New Indicators of Disadvantage Project: Deprivation in Australia
