The Relationship between Community and Individual Measures of Wellbeing: comparisons by remoteness for Indigenous Australians

For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Indigenous) Australians, the wellbeing of the community in which one lives and/or has an ongoing attachment to is an important aspect of individual health and wellbeing. In non-Indigenous policy discourse, the main way to summarise community-level wellbeing is through indices of socioeconomic outcomes that can be used to rank regions or areas within regions. While these have been produced for the Indigenous population, they only capture one particular aspect of community wellbeing. The analysis presented in this paper extends our knowledge of place-based community wellbeing by looking at the presence or absence of particular facilities, barriers to accessing services, and neighbourhood or community problems. Indigenous Australians in remote areas were less likely to report the presence of a number of facilities and more likely to report barriers to accessing government services. However, there were no consistent differences in the reporting of neighbourhood and community problems—some types of problems had a higher incidence in non-remote areas (e.g. theft and dangerous or noisy driving), whilst other problems were higher in remote areas (alcohol, illegal drugs and violence). Indices of these variables were also found to be associated with individual emotional wellbeing, providing prima facie evidence of the link between community and individual measures.