Disabled people are faring worse than non-disabled people across a range of wellbeing and labour market outcomes, Stats NZ said today.
Data from a new supplement, added to the June 2020 quarter of the household labour force survey, shows that disabled people were more likely than non-disabled people to rate their lives poorly in a number of key aspects, including overall life satisfaction, how worthwhile they felt their life was, and family wellbeing.
Disability status is strongly correlated with age.
“Older people are more likely to be identified as disabled,” wellbeing and housing statistics manager Dr Claire Bretherton said.
“However, people aged 65 years and over are less likely to participate in the labour market, and can have quite different wellbeing outcomes to younger people.”
Because of this age effect, the data used here is restricted to adults aged 18 to 64 only.
Within this age group, 44 percent of disabled people rated their overall life satisfaction poorly (0‒6 on a scale from 0 to 10), compared with just 15 percent of non-disabled people.
Additionally, almost a third of disabled people gave a low rating for how worthwhile they felt their life was (30 percent), and 29 percent rated their family’s wellbeing poorly.
| | Disabled |
| Overall life satisfaction | 43.6 |
| Life worthwhile | 29.9 |
| Family wellbeing | 29 |
| 36.8 | 50.4 |
|---|---|
| 24 | 35.8 |
| 24.2 | 33.8 |
| | Non-disabled |
| Overall life satisfaction | 15.1 |
| Life worthwhile | 12 |
| Family wellbeing | 14.2 |
| 14.1 | 16.1 |
|---|---|
| 11.1 | 12.9 |
| 13.3 | 15.1 |
