The volume and detail of publicly available data is growing at a rapid pace. In Australia, the federal, and many state governments disseminate information on a range of topics from health, education, crime and social well-being on open data portals, which the public are free to access and study.

In the absence of sophisticated modelling skills, the size and depth of the data is overwhelming, making it impossible to eyeball and understand information in any meaningful way. Dashboards are a technique of conveying data information that rely on visualisations that are intuitive for the audience to understand and commonly used in the public domain. These visualisations are supplemented with filters that allow the user to explore subsets of data that are of interest, and allow for cross comparison between groups.

In this series, we are illustrating the use of dashboards to demonstrate societal information extracted from publicly available data.

The census data (2021) is used to examine social disadvantage at Statistical Area 3 (SA3) level. Statistical areas are a geographical structure created to analyse data collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and generally consist of a population that constitute a region, with population in the range of approximately 30,000 - 130,000. For further details see Main Structure and Greater Capital City Statistical Areas

The data extracted from the census focus on levels of disadvantage in these regions. For the population in general, the Index of Relative Socio-economic Disadvantage (Walker & Hiller, 2005) was used. This index is termed SEIFA in the dashboard. This measure of disadvantage combines multiple household and individual factors including work, employment, income and housing, into a single measure to represent the level of disadvantage within the SA3.

Within the dashboard, data are displayed in deciles, which group levels of disadvantage into 10 groups. These groups consist of the 10% intervals, with decile 1 being the 10% most disadvantaged, through to decile 10 being the 10% least disadvantaged SA3s.

As our indigenous population is represented by generally small percentages of the population within an SA3, we have used an index of relative indigenous socio-economic outcomes (Biddle, 2009) to allow a more detailed examination of indigenous disadvantage at the SA3s level. This index will work well in SA3s that have a relatively high number of indigenous residents, however, due to privacy concerns with small populations, the data and subsequent index need to be treated as inexact.

This work was based on a PAG consulting task that examined the population of pre-school children and the SA3s in which they lived. To this end, the dashboard provides additional details for children 0-4 years:

The 2021 census data were obtained using the freely available table builder provided by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. TableBuilder

1.  Walker, R. and Hiller, J.E. (2005). The Index of Relative Socio-economic Disadvantage: general population views on indicators used to determine area-based disadvantage. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, 29: 442-447. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-842X.2005.tb00224.x

2.  Biddle, N., (2009). Ranking regions-revisiting an index of relative indigenous socio-economic outcomes. Australasian Journal of Regional Studies, The, 15(3), pp.329-353. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/162631007.pdf