Identifying autistic tamariki Māori using the Integrated Data Infrastructure

Te Rourou Tātaritanga: Informatics for Social Services and Wellbeing aims to address New Zealand's critical need for better linking of data and access to datasets, leveraging administrative and other data resources to advance excellence in the use of social data.

Andrew Sporle is a co-leader on the project, alongside researchers from the University of Auckland and Victoria University of Wellington.

Funded by: Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment Endeavour Fund
Grant number: 62506 ENDRP

Te Rourou Tātaritanga aims to improve data standards, support secure and ethical access to data, and promote Māori data sovereignty, while addressing privacy, legal, and security considerations surrounding the use of social data. By strengthening how social data is linked, accessed, and analysed, the programme will support more informed decision-making in the development of social policy.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted and exacerbated health inequities between Māori and other New Zealanders. These inequities were predicted by early disease outcome modelling, demonstrated after the second outbreak, and inspired a robust equity-driven vaccination prioritisation strategy the Government was slow to adopt. Central Government’s failure to pro-actively focus on preventing inequity has been the subject of two High Court cases and an urgent Treaty of Waitangi hearing: the predicted inequity occurred and is now routinely reported at a national level in Crown health data.

Alongside the National Hauora Coalition, iNZight Analytics has produced a number of reports on the use of Crown data to improve COVID-19 outcomes for Māori.

Initial report commissioned by: National Hauora Coalition
Additional resourcing from: iNZight Analytics

The initial report from focused on using Crown data to highlight potential focuses of Crown action to improve COVID-19 outcomes for Māori. We put a Te Tiriti lens on the available data to also provide information on how policy amenable factors relate to COVID-19 outcomes, with the aim of identifying potential policy targets that could reduce future health inequities faced by Māori. The report begins with a demonstration of the inequity between Māori/non-Māori and the association of these inequities with area-based social deprivation as measured by the NZ Deprivation Index. However, the intent of was report is to highlight government policy targets, so we then examine whether household and individual factors are associated with good or poor outcomes for Māori specifically.

This report used data in the Stats NZ Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) to quantify and examine inequities with respect to four COVID-19 outcomes: testing positive, hospitalisations, deaths, and vaccination status. This involve dall the available data in the IDI for the entire duration of the pandemic in Aotearoa (as at October 2023) that can be linked at an individual level. This was the first time such a comprehensive analysis of COVID-19 inequity for Māori has been done in Aotearoa. This report is not available to the public.

A technical report of the methods used for this work was later published by iNZight Analytics: More than just living in a deprived area: an equity-focused analysis of policy amenable factors associated with Māori COVID-19 outcomes. This is available for download in the links section.

Using data from Statistics New Zealand’s Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI), this research examines life outcomes for autistic Māori across key areas, and seeks to identify associated patterns of government service use and costs.

Hosted by: The University of Otago