Lecture 20 Structure and Composition in NZ

Question 1

Why do we need population data?

Answer 1

For measuring trends in births, mortality, morbidites and migration
For more applied work: unemployment/benefit/pensions, crime, health service utilisation, vote turnout, political party voted for, education pathway

Question 2

Demographic Terminology

Answer 2

Population structure = age & sex, Population composition = by other attributes

Question 3

Population pyramids

Answer 3

X-axis: males of left, females on right
Y-axis: age

Question 4

What is the age structure of Maori and non Maori population

Answer 4

Maori has a higher proportion of their population in the younger age group, while non maori population is more evenly distributed

Question 5

What is notable about the census

Answer 5

Enumeration officers were employed to contact individual households and manage meshblocks, went online in 2018 (this meant that they lost a lot of respondents but saved costs)

Question 6

What is the Estimated Resident Population?

Answer 6

Estimate of all people who usually live in NZ at a given date. Doesn’t typically break down by ethnic group

Question 7

What is Vital Events?

Answer 7

Births, Deaths and Marriages

Question 8

What is the health service utilization and outcome

Answer 8

Ministry of Health record and report pubically funded health information like hospitalizations, blood tests

Question 9

What is the nationally representative surveys

Answer 9

NZ health survey manages survey with key topics and spotlight coverage on less common issues, self reported health and health behaviors

Question 10

What are Ad hoc surveys?

Answer 10

Student satisfaction survey, market research companies: may not be generalized to the wider population

Question 11

What is the IDI

Answer 11

Uses information from lots of different government agencies, information is de-identified, data can be linked from multiple sources and create a population, to be counted you have to have an interaction with one or more of these agencies

Question 12

Why do denominators and age structure matter?

Answer 12

In one example, HSU distribution for asian males and females was asymmetrical, suggesting that younger asian males had fewer health contacts than femals and males between 19-30 years in the HSU population had much lower counted than the IDI and census population

Question 13

How do events determine population structure?

Answer 13

• Age-sex structure is a function of previous patterns/trends of fertility, migration and mortality events (births depleted by deaths +- migration)
• Changes in fertility rate: dramatic but has time lag
• Changes in adult mortality rates are less dramatic and less variable

Question 14

What are the impacts of covid 19 on population strucure?

Answer 14

Less working age so less staff, global shift in availability of groups

Question 15

How can population structure affect events?

Answer 15

Age sex structure has a crucial influence on the rates that fertility (young adult women), mortality (mostly very young/elderly) and migration (sex and life cycle stage) e.g area with a younger population will have less death rates and more fertility and migration

Question 16

How do we find child and elderly dependency ratios?

Answer 16

Child: 0-14 years/working age
Elderly: over 65/working age
Total: child +elderly / working age

Question 17

What does it mean if we have a higher elderly dependency ratio?

Answer 17

There are more old people depending on the working age, which means there are going to be changes in the health system to address the needs of the elderly. Chronic illnesses are going to last over a lifetime which is going to be a burden for the health system

Question 18

What are the ethnic composition of NZ?

Answer 18

Depends on the data sources used and the ethnicity coding protocol used

Question 19

What is the difference between total response, prioritized and sole/combination?

Answer 19

In prioritized, people are assigned to a single ethnic group, which is advantageous as it means minorities are not swamped and produces data easy to work with. Disadvantages are that it overrepresents some groups and is inconsistent with the concept of self identification
In total response, it has the potential to represent people who don’t identify with any ethnic group. Disadvantages are that it creates complexities in the distribution of funding and interpretation of data due to the overlapping data.

Question 20

What is numerical aging?

Answer 20

• absolute increase in the population that is elderly (reflects demographic patterns and improvements in life expectancy)
• Structural ageing is the increase in proportion of the population that is elderly (driven by decreases in fertility rates and began occurring in the 1800s)

Question 21

What is natural decline of the population? (population impacts of ageing)

Answer 21

Occurs when there are more deaths than births in a population, a combination of structural and absolute ageing, more elderly = more deaths

Question 22

What is the absolute decline of the population? (population impacts of ageing)

Answer 22

Occurs when there is insufficient migration to replace lost births and deaths (not expected to happen in NZ for 70+ years but expected for some european/asian countries

Question 23

What are the main causes of death in NZ?

Answer 23

cancer, ischaemic heart disease etc are still prevalent

Question 24

What are the stages of the demographic transition?

Answer 24

1, pre transition: High birth rate/High death rate (flunctuating) = low total population
2, declining mortality: High birth rate/Decreasing mortality = increasing total population
3, fertility rates and death rates decline = increasing total population
4, low fertility and mortality = leveling off total population