Abstract
Social exclusion is a multi-dimensional measure of disadvantage that spans a number of aspects of an individual’s life that impact upon their current and future wellbeing. For young people at an important life stage transitioning from childhood to adulthood, contributing factors to social exclusion and the consequences of social exclusion will vary. Using specialised data from the 2011 Australian Census, supplemented with national school assessment data, we use a domains approach to construct an index that is representative of youth at risk of social exclusion, using a combination of principal components and equal weighting techniques. The index provides important information that can inform direct policy action, especially in areas where the extent of relative multi-dimensional disadvantage is worse.
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Notes
A carer is a person of any age who provides any informal assistance, in terms of help or supervision, to persons with disability or long-term health conditions or persons who are elderly (i.e. aged 65 years and over).
The transformation used is as follows. For any small area, denote its rank on the index, scaled to the range [0,1], by R (with R = 1/N for the least deprived, and R = N/N, i.e. R = 1, for the most deprived, where N = the total number of small areas). The transformed index, X say, is X = −23 × log {1 − R × [1 − exp(−100/23)]} where log denotes natural logarithm and exp the exponential or antilog transformation.
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Acknowledgments
This study was funded by a Discovery Grant from the Australian Research Council (DP1094318). The authors would like to thank the Chief Investigators and Partner Investigators on the grant Prof. Anne Daly, Prof. Laurie Brown, Ms. Rebecca Cassells, Prof. Asher Ben-Arieh, Prof. Michael Noble and Ms. Leanne Johnson.
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Abello, A., Cassells, R., Daly, A. et al. Youth Social Exclusion in Australian Communities: A New Index. Soc Indic Res 128, 635–660 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-015-1048-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-015-1048-9