Data integrity
The data in this report applies only to people recorded as part of the Victorian Government’s Disability Advocacy Program. Organisations providing the data may support additional clients using other funding, and there are also other disability advocacy organisations that provide similar services but are not funded through this program. These additional clients and services are not covered by this data collection process, and are not included in this report.
This report should be read understanding the limitations of the data provided. There are a number of data integrity issues that affect how the data can be interpreted.
Information provided by the Office for Disability to the Disability Advocacy Resource Unit (DARU) has been de-identified to maintain the privacy and confidentiality of individuals with a disability.
DARU has only received the data presented here in aggregated form. The data has been aggregated and verified by the Office for Disability.
Data was not provided to DARU for all fields in the Quarterly Data Collection process for the Advocacy Program. All primary data provided to DARU has been reported in this document.
The data is not clearly and consistently reported by disability advocacy organisations. For example, organisations did not record:
- The gender of 47 per cent of their clients
- The age of 43 per cent of their clients
Similarly, the data does not allow us to identify the proportion of clients for whom Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander status or cultural and linguistic diversity was not recorded.
The advocacy topics recorded by organisations are, at times, unclear. Organisations may report multiple advocacy issues for the same client, and in some cases, may not identify an advocacy issue for every client. We cannot tell from the data whether advocacy issues were not recorded, or multiple issues were recorded for the same person. It is also not clear that organisations are recording the same types of advocacy issues in the same categories, with many issues open to interpretation as to which category they may belong.
In 2014-15, the disability advocacy quarterly data collection began collecting data on the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) as a separate issue to ‘disability services’. These have been added together for the purposes of this report to maintain continuity over the four year period.
The issues of data integrity are addressed in more detail in a separate companion document to this report, the Data Integrity Supplementary Report.