Summary

Accurate data about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are needed to guide policy formulation, program development and service delivery, towards closing the gap in disadvantage between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and non-Indigenous Australians. Progress is difficult to measure accurately because many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are not consistently identified as such in key data sets. 

Data linkage offers a cost-effective approach to enhancing the completeness and consistency of Indigenous status information on key data sets, for purposes of statistical reporting. There are, however, no nationally agreed approaches on how to deal with missing or inconsistent Indigenous status reporting across data sets. This leads to different methods being used and difficulties in interpreting findings, particularly when comparing results across studies.

To ensure that a consistent and informed program of data linkage work is carried out across Australia, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) tasked the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to develop national best practice guidelines for linking data relating to Indigenous people. 

To inform the preparation of the Guidelines, COAG also tasked the AIHW and ABS to conduct a review of past, ongoing and planned data linkage studies in Australia and overseas that have an Indigenous focus. The review studies are published separately, as attachments to these Guidelines. The AIHW and ABS not only worked closely but also consulted widely in the development of these Guidelines. The review of past, current and planned data linkage studies points to two main ways in which data linkage is used in studies related to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Data linkage has been used to enhance the quality of Indigenous status information on key data sets, especially where Indigenous status is missing or inconsistently reported across data sets. It has also been used to add value to data sets by bringing together data items from multiple data sets, with a view to carrying out analysis that would be impossible to undertake if the research were based on the individual data sets. In both cases, data linkage has not been used to alter Indigenous status information on source data sets.

The Guidelines focus on six key aspects of data linkage. These are the values and ethics in human research relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, transparency and accountability, the quality of the Indigenous status variable on key data sets, the quality of the variables that are used for the linkage, the quality of the linkage itself, and the methods and algorithms used to derive Indigenous status where Indigenous status varies across the individual data sets in the linked data set.Accurate data about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are needed to guide policy formulation, program development and service delivery, towards closing the gap in disadvantage between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and non-Indigenous Australians. Progress is difficult to measure accurately because many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are not consistently identified as such in key data sets.