Projects

The Place of Caregiving: Community Environments, Participation, Health and Wellbeing

This HRC project (00/423) comprises three components. The first component entailed construction of a Community Resource Accessibility Index (CRAI), a meshblock level indicator of relative access to urban services, facilities and amenities, in the 2374 urban meshblocks of North Shore and Waitakere cities.  The index was developed using GIS technology, and comprises 36 types of services and amenities grouped into six domains:

1. Sport and recreational facilities (eg parks, beaches, libraries and sports clubrooms)
2. Public transport and communication (bus, train and ferry routes, and public phones)
3. Shopping facilities (eg dairies, cafés, banks, supermarkets and service stations)
4. Educational facilities (ranging from pre-school through to tertiary)
5. Health facilities (eg GP clinics, pharmacies and hospitals)
6. Social and cultural facilities (eg community centres, marae, churches and Citizens’ Advice Bureau) The 4,200 services, amenities and facilities mapped in CRAI were open-entry and non-specialist, where comparable data was available in both cities. The CRAI measures relative locational accessibility to services, amenities and facilities, using the meshblock centroid as a proxy for people’s homes. Network analysis, that takes account of walkways as well as roads, was used to determine accessibility.
 
In the second component 30+ Maori, pakeha and Samoan caregivers of young children were interviewed in different localities concerning their use of amenity and services, experience of neighbourhood, community participation and sources of support in their parenting role. Analysis of the transcripts of these interviews revealed striking dissimilarities in the respondents’ experiences of the physical and social environments in which they live. While there were substantial differences in the nature of the neighbourhood social relations of different ethnic groups and in the way caregivers/parents of different ethnicities interacted with the service and amenity landscapes, distinctions between the localities were consistent. Opportunities for incidental interactions with other neighbourhood residents varied between the localities as did the strength of local identification, the density of local social contacts and what we have termed neighbourhood optimism. Consistent patterns emerged across the areas with neighbourhood optimism/pessimism influencing attributes such as perceptions of local children’s behaviour and local parenting, knowledge of local action for social or environmental change, locality attachment and commitment, and desired neighbourhood change
 
The third component, for which data gathering was completed in June 02, was a survey of 840 caregivers living within 210 meshblocks across Waitakere and North Shore cities, randomly selected proportional to the number of dwellings with children 0- 10years in the 2001 Census. Multilevel analyses are underway using meshblock level CRAI scores, NZ Deprivation Index scores and social cohesion variables from the survey as neighbourhood level variables and individual level variables from the survey to predict health outcomes. Data was gathered used CATI (computer assisted telephone interviewing) with a door to door recruitment mode using a cellphone, to identify households with no telephone or an unpublished number.
 
SHORE researchers involved in the project: Karen Witten, Tim McCreanor, Helen Moewaka Barnes, Liane Penney, Victoria Jensen, Megan Tunks

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