Te Hotonga Hapori aims to enhance the wellbeing of people and communities who live in urban neighbourhoods. We measure wellbeing over time so we can identify aspects of neighbourhoods that are important for wellbeing and find ways to make urban communities more liveable.
Our take on Wellbeing
What is Wellbeing?
We think about wellbeing as the ability of people and communities to live good lives, as they themselves define them. This means we are interested in a range of factors that help people and communities to live good lives and do the things that are important to them. These factors include life domains such as health, safety, social connection, material standard of living, a clean environment and balance between work and other aspects of life.
Having good outcomes across these different life domains is important for people, families, whānau and communities to exercise control over their own lives, and in ways that reflect their values and culture.
How will we measure wellbeing?
In Te Hotonga Hapori, wellbeing is measured both by looking at how people, families, whānau, and communities are doing in terms of these different life domains and how they feel about their lives. We will gather information on wellbeing in three different ways.
We will look at existing data records on life domains from Statistics New Zealand’s Integrated Data Infrastructure to build a picture of how communities across New Zealand are doing.
We will also ask people living in different areas about their wellbeing through a survey. This survey will ask questions about the different life domains as well their subjective perceptions of life: how satisfied they are with their life, and how well their family or whānau are doing.
Finally, we will collect information on how people feel as they go about their daily life. We will use a mobile research app that can collect information about people’s feelings at a particular place and time. This will allow us to link how people are feeling directly to aspects of the neighbourhood environment.
For more information contact Julia McPhee – julia.mcphee@aut.ac.nz.
How will these data be used?
The measures of wellbeing collected through Te Hotonga Hapori will be used to identify aspects of neighbourhoods that enhance or undermine peoples’ wellbeing. These insights will help government, developers, and community organisations to better support wellbeing throughout redevelopment as well as design neighbourhoods that enhance the long-term wellbeing of communities.
All information that we collect is anonymised and it is not possible to identify individual responses in any reports. You can read our Privacy and Data Security Policy here.