We've created a Social Investment Analytical Layer (SIAL): events-structured tables that arrange a version of the data held in Statistics NZ's Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI)(external link) into a consistent format, making it easier and faster for authorised IDI users (researchers and analysts) to use and understand.
The SIAL is designed to be reusable. It reformats all the social sector tables available in the IDI into tables based on events (events-structured). Here are the datasets available in the SIAL [PPTX, 244 KB].
Accessing cross-agency data structured into events means authorised IDI users can easily and quickly gain a more complete understanding of a person’s experiences throughout their life. This is key to implementing the social investment approach, e.g.:
Without the SIAL, producing this profile would be an involved and lengthy process. SIAL will save analysts months of work.
Authorised IDI users can also create metrics within a specified date range, including (but not limited to):
Authorised IDI users are given access to certain tables. In line with permissions granted as part of their project access, users will also be given access to a corresponding events-structured table (if available). Code to generate events tables has been written in a mix of SAS and SQL.
The SIAL code is hosted on GitHub(external link) – a dedicated online hosting service where the open source community share their code. Github allows for anyone to see their code, issues to be raised, version control and collaboration.
The code needed to build the SIAL tables can be viewed and downloaded at:
https://github.com/nz-social-investment-unit/social_investment_analytical_layer(external link)
To use the code:
More detailed instructions can be found in the README file.
Users are free to use the code as is or to create their own additional SIAL tables. We'd love it if you contributed your code to the master version on GitHub. Please contact info@swa.govt.nz to do this.
