Limitations
The main limitation to the research presented in this report is that the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA) client status of veterans who served prior to 1985 can not be identified. As outlined in the previous section, this limitation could be overcome by direct linkage (through a hybrid spine with Defence personnel data and with DVA client data to PLIDA and the ABS Census data but the quality of earlier DVA data and the self-reported nature of the data may still impact analysis.
Veterans are determined as being in DVA client group based on information that was available for this analysis. However, information on some DVA services was not available for this analysis such as Open Arms services or support services that were provided to family members of veterans and as such non-DVA clients and earlier DVA clients may be overestimates of veterans who have not or not recently engaged with DVA.
There is a limitation in interpreting veterans in the earlier DVA client category as people who have not interacted with DVA services recently. This cohort includes DVA clients who have not received DVA support in the past 2 years (based on the available data sources), but it also includes veterans who received modest financial support in the past 2 years (as people who received this level of support were not considered to be recent DVA clients). Earlier DVA clients who received financial support in the past 2 years were those who were not receiving regular income where the financial support would be considered the primary source of income.
Another important limitation for this research is linkage errors. Where person level records are joined across multiple datasets there is a possibility that people do not match or match incorrectly. This risk can be greater where data is of lower quality, which may be more likely when data is older. This can lead to selection bias or measurement error.
There are also limitations that apply to analysing the cohort of veterans identified in the Census, including the pre-1985 veterans. The Census relies on a person self-identifying as a veteran and serving and ex-serving members may choose not to do so.
Any future analysis of the full cohort of veterans (including those who served prior to 1985) by DVA client status will require linkage between Census, Defence personnel and DVA client data. As a result, due to limitations imposed by the Census and Statistics Act 1905, this research can only be undertaken using PLIDA.
Further work is required to assess the quality of a linkage between PLIDA (Census data) and a hybrid spine of Defence personnel data and DVA client data.