In the first study of its kind, scientists have mapped what wellbeing looks like across New Zealand. Photo / Richard Robinson
In the first study of its kind, scientists have mapped what wellbeing looks like across New Zealand. Photo / Richard Robinson
Can we map our own wellbeing?
In what’s a major step towards understanding Kiwis’ quality of life, scientists have crunched a vast amount of data to build the first and richest picture of its kind here.
With a trove of public datasets to draw on, researchers have been turning to“spatial microsimulation” models smart enough to capture complex health and social patterns, right down to suburb level.
The latest study, published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, sought to analyse wellbeing at both a personal and national level across New Zealand - and unpick how this was influenced by factors like location, demographics and socioeconomic conditions.
“Understanding quality of life is important for many reasons, both at an individual and societal level,” said the study’s lead author, Dr Jesse Wiki of the University of Auckland.
Policymakers have long used a range of quality-of-life indicators to inform decisions around everything from healthcare and education to social services and infrastructure development.
That made it all the more important to better understand those disparities dividing our society - whether by income, ethnicity, gender or suburb.
“While there are some surveys that collect information on well-being in Aotearoa-New Zealand, these are typically only for certain geographic areas or for small groups of the population,” Wiki said.
Wiki’s study went wider - and deeper - by combining aggregate-level data from the 2018 Census with a wealth of individual-level information gleaned from nearly 48,000 respondents in the long-running New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study.
Her team created new indexes for both personal wellbeing - comprised of aspects like health, relationships, living standards, future security - and national wellbeing, which included things like economic and social conditions across the country.
After the survey respondents provided scores of their own wellbeing ranging from 0 to 10, the team linked that data with five Census-derived variables: age, sex, ethnicity, highest qualification, and labour force status.
Finally, they used a spatial microsimulation model to produce a “synthetic dataset” - or one that used sophisticated algorithms to fill gaps in the real-world data.
“This approach has rarely been used in previous research from Aotearoa New Zealand, but provides a useful way to create nationwide data that can be used to understand population outcomes.”
The findings revealed those national wellbeing scores to be lower than personal ones, with respective means of 5.3 and 6.9.
They also turned up variations that broadly reflected patterns of socio-economic deprivation - something the researchers had been expecting to see.
“Areas of high socioeconomic deprivation were typically highlighted as those with low wellbeing scores, while areas of low socioeconomic deprivation were typically highlighted as those with high well-being scores,” Wiki said.
“Additionally, low wellbeing scores for both personal and national wellbeing measures were most evident in rural areas of high socioeconomic deprivation - particularly those with large Māori populations.”
Those places included Northland and the East Cape, along with scattered areas throughout the central North Island.
In cities, poorer scores could be seen in South Auckland, Porirua and the east side of Christchurch.
That contrasted with the pattern observed in many central business areas, such as in Dunedin, north and central Auckland, and much of inner Wellington and Christchurch.
These maps show data-informed scores of New Zealand's wellbeing by location, with scores of "personal" wellbeing on the left - and "societal" wellbeing on the right. Image / Jesse Wiki
“In such areas, personal wellbeing was generally moderate to high and national wellbeing was high.”
That was also the case with rural areas with low deprivation and high Pākehā populations, like central and southern areas of the South Island, including the Lakes District.
“While such findings are not unexpected, it’s important to take into consideration what is included in these measures of wellbeing,” she said.
“It’s also important to recognise that some aspects of these measures - such as personal relationships - extend far beyond the home environment into the community, workplace environments, and educational environments.”
For all its ground-breaking value, Wiki said the study did have some obvious limitations: one being that it only captured a snapshot in time.
“Measures of quality of life and well-being are often influenced by a person’s entire life course, and while this study presents nationwide findings for one point in time, it cannot ascertain what the situation was prior to this time, or the reasons for people answering the survey questions as they did.”
Still, she saw the modelling approach as a powerful one for researchers to use in future - especially in population health - and the study marked a “major advancement” for its use in New Zealand.
Jamie Morton is a specialist in science and environmental reporting. He joined the Herald in 2011 and writes about everything from conservation and climate change to natural hazards and new technology.
