Our people - Multidimensional wellbeing in New Zealand

This paper sets out to measure and reflect the wellbeing of New Zealanders across different areas of their lives, as expressed in the Treasury's Living Standards Framework (LSF). We are publishing the paper alongside the first version of the LSF Dashboard, which the Treasury is developing to inform its policy advice. The analysis in the paper provides the basis for the Our People section of the Dashboard. Reflecting the importance of the multidimensional nature of wellbeing, the paper presents estimates of wellbeing across multiple domains at the same time, assesses the extent to which these domains relate to each other, and looks at the distribution of wellbeing across these domains according to a set of key population demographic and socio-economic characteristics. Levels of wellbeing are defined for nine of the 12 LSF current wellbeing domains: Subjective wellbeing, Civic engagement and governance, Cultural identity, Health, Housing, Income and consumption, Knowledge and skills, Safety, and Social connections. We were unable to calculate measures for the remaining three domains: Environment, Time use, and Jobs and earnings. We define wellbeing for each LSF domain at both the high and low ends of the wellbeing spectrum, with the rest of the population described as having medium wellbeing on each domain. We also distinguish between descriptions of ‘multidimensional wellbeing', where we examine all measured LSF domains at once, and a newly developed ‘cross-domain wellbeing' measure; an aggregate measure that seeks to reflect a person's overall wellbeing across the continuum and across domains. In the construction of our cross-domain wellbeing measure, we exclude the Subjective wellbeing domain, as we view this as representing an alternative proxy measure of overall (cross-domain) wellbeing. By incorporating both ends of the wellbeing spectrum in our analysis we capture both the risk and the resilience associated with aspects of people's overall wellbeing. We show that ‘high' wellbeing in a domain can offset ‘low' wellbeing in another domain, at least with respect to subjective wellbeing. Measures are constructed using data from the NZ General Social Survey (GSS), undertaken biennially by Stats NZ since 2008. In this report, we use a combined dataset derived from the 2014 and 2016 survey years, giving a total sample of approximately 16,000 respondents. The use of a single survey instrument to construct measures of multidimensional wellbeing has the obvious advantage that the relationship between dimensions can be examined for the same group of people, providing insights into the way the different dimensions interact. Measurement of wellbeing for some domains is more nuanced than for others, and likely to be more robust in reflecting the underlying concept of interest. In particular, Cultural identity wellbeing, and Knowledge and skills wellbeing, are not very well measured in this paper. Each of these measures reflects responses to a single question in the GSS, and could be seen as representing only one aspect of that domain.