It all begins in the home – the experience, satisfaction and well-being of Aboriginal people in community housing

Objectives

Provide an up-to-date understanding of AHO tenant satisfaction and experience

Establish satisfaction, community belonging and health and well-being, education and employment baseline rates and levels for longitudinal research purposes

For the first time, capture measures of the importance of culture in the home

Obtain tenant perspectives on Aboriginal housing to inform improvements in service planning and delivery

Methodology

Methodology TargetAudience

Sample Size & Source

Questionnaire Length

Timing

Face to face interviews in the

home using tablet computers by Roy Morgan Research

$15 thank you payment

Tenants of ACHPs 16+ or other home

residents knowledgeable about housing

services

Sourced from AHO records

n=400 completes achieved

40-50 minutes onaverage

July-October 2018

Letters describing the project were sent to Aboriginal Community housing organisations and tenants prior to the surveying. Community consultations were also conducted.

Our Impressions of How It All Went and Why

Survey not viewed as a burden, or unnecessary, or a duplication of any other recent survey

Very few complaints about survey questions, length, or interviewers

$15 “thank you” was welcomed

A low refusal rate (6%) – which includes no shows

98.5% of the 400 ACHP participants agreed to be followed up “in a couple of years to see how you are going.”

Satisfaction rankings

Satisfaction with Overall Housing Provider Services – by region & provider size

56% 67% 59% 50% 58% 68% 57% 53% 62%

-30% -22% -30% -35% -26% -21% -35% -32% -22%

-100%-80%-60%-40%-20%

0%20%40%60%80%

100%

Total ACHP City Inner Outer Remote Small Medium Large AHO owned

Total satisfied Total dissatified

Service contact incidence rate - past yearIn the prior 12 months, nine in ten tenants made contact (of any type) with their housing provider. About 90% of tenants contacted their housing provider in the last 12 months for at least one maintenance problem

% of total sample

At least one emergency maintenance contact 67%

At least one day- to-day maintenance contact 66%

At least one non-maintenance contact 37%

At least one maintenance contact (emergency or day-to-day) 88%

At least one of any type of contact 91%

83% 81%86%

65%

83%76% 76%

85%

75% 75%

51%

70%

83%78%

96% 97% 97%91% 94% 97% 96% 98% 99% 98%

93%100%

93%98%

Meets Needs Important

Current Home Features

Omits tenants responding “not applicable”

Benefits of Aboriginal Housing - cultural needs and features of the home

82%78%

90%98%

Proximity to cultural places Cultural features of the home

Meets needs Importance

Cultural features of the home included meeting places and rooms for visitors, which were important to nearly all ACHP tenants.

Benefits of Aboriginal Housing

91%

81%

Helped to Improve Family Life/Kinship Helped Me to Feel More Culturally Connected

Compare: Enjoy better health (75%)

Personal Wellbeing

Personal Wellbeing Satisfaction Ratings

80.45

76.79

68.77

75.01

87.69

82.94

79.75

69.63

73.74

Life as a whole

MEAN PWI

Your health

Things you want to be good at

Getting on with people you know

How safe you feel

Doing things away from home

What may happen to you later in life

Things you have

Answers multiplied by 10 to comply with standards for scale.

PWI NORMATIVE RANGE IN AU: 73.40-76.40

Summary

Binary logistic regression was run on the survey data to identify predictors of tenant satisfactionIt is the ability to model the probability of a certain binary outcome based on one or many potential predictorsResults are seen as ‘odds ratios’ where it is the odds of one event occurring in comparison to another.

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Analysis

Variables of significance were chosen to be run in the model.Significance was identified at 95% confidence (α=0.05).9 predictors were modelled with the outcome variable, Satisfaction.

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Analysis

SATISFACTION

Household composition

Number of structural problems

Housing utilisation

Thermal comfort

Cultural needs

Cultural benefits

Number of overall contacts

Day-to-day repairs and maintenanceEmergency repairs and

maintenance

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Structural problems

An odds ratio of 4.29 indicates that tenants with 0 structural problems are 4.29 times more likely to be satisfied than tenants with 3+ structural problems, controlling for all other factors in the model.

This is also in-line with the findings from the National Social Housing Survey, where number of structural findings was also the strongest predictor of tenant satisfaction with services provided.

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Emergency repairs and maintenance contacts

The variable transformed into a binary variable, 0 contacts vs. 1+ contacts.

Tenants with 0 contacts to their provider for emergency repairs and maintenance are 2.48 times more likely to be satisfied than tenants with 1+ contacts, controlling for all other factors.

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Cultural benefits

Tenants who answered: “yes it has helped” to either “feel more culturally connected” OR “have an improved family life/kinship”.

Tenants who benefitted culturally from being in an ACHP managed property are 1.99 times more likely to be satisfied than those who did not benefit culturally, controlling for all other factors.

This is key as the AHO’s strategy places “putting culture and community voice at the centre”2.

2NSW Aboriginal Housing Office. (2019). Strong Family, Strong Communities 2018–2028 Implementation Plan 2019–2022 (p. 6). Parramatta: NSW Aboriginal Housing Office.22

Cultural needs

Tenants who answered: “(yes)meets needs” to both “cultural features of the home” AND “(distance/proximity to) cultural places”.

Tenants who had their cultural needs met are 1.64 times more likely to be satisfied than those who did not have their cultural needs met, controlling for all other factors.

This is key as the AHO’s strategy places “putting culture and community voice at the centre”2.

2NSW Aboriginal Housing Office. (2019). Strong Family, Strong Communities 2018–2028 Implementation Plan 2019–2022 (p. 6). Parramatta: NSW Aboriginal Housing Office.23

Thermal comfort

Next stepsSurvey

AHO to share results to tenants and maintain engagement through mail-outs

Continue longitudinal study with the same tenants to track satisfaction, experience, health and well-being, employment and social outcomes - next survey in 2020

More measures on culture – and Aboriginal peoples’ measures of success

Acknowledge nations/people identity

Service Delivery

A target to provide at least 65% of AHO houses with solar power and 35% of AHO houses with air-conditioning

More funding to repairs and maintenance and a target of refurbishing 1,500 houses

A repairs and maintenance pilot that employs local Aboriginal businesses and people, alongside a tenant education program

Thank you Maria Kevin, Manager Research and

Analysis and Jessica de Jesus, Senior Research Analyst