• Community Services (retired), Standard 23/05/2013
• Disability, Standard 13/08/2015

National Disability Agreement: i(1)-Proportion of primary carers of people with disability who report a need for further assistance in their caring roles, 2013
Community Services (retired), Standard 23/05/2013
Disability, Standard 13/08/2015

The SDAC is collected, processed, and published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The ABS operates within the framework of the Census and Statistics Act 1905 and the Australian Bureau of Statistics Act 1975. These ensure the independence and impartiality of the ABS, and the confidentiality of respondents.

For more information on the institutional environment of the ABS, including legislative obligations, financing and governance arrangements, and mechanisms for scrutiny of ABS operations, please see ABS Institutional Environment.

The SDAC collects information about primary carers and non-primary carers of people with disabilities.

A primary carer is a person who provides the most informal assistance, in terms of help or supervision, to a person with one or more disabilities. The assistance has to be ongoing, or likely to be ongoing, for at least six months and be provided for one or more of the core activities (communication, mobility and self-care). In this survey, primary carers only include persons aged 15 years and over for whom a personal interview was conducted.

Persons who confirm they are the primary carer of a person with disability are asked about the assistance they provide, the assistance they can call on, and their employment experience. They are also asked to complete a self-enumeration form which collects information about their attitudes to, and experience of, their caring role. Where the carer has more than one recipient of care, the information collected in the personal interview and self-enumeration form is in regard to the person who the carer considers receives the most care and attention from him/her (the main recipient of care).

The denominator for this indicator relates to a subpopulation of primary carers identified in the SDAC. This consists of primary carers with main recipient of care aged:

• 0-64 years, or
• 65 years and over, but only where the carer is also caring for someone aged 0-64 years who lives with the carer and the recipient aged 0-64 years has a profound or severe core activity limitation.

As age and disability status are collected or derived from information provided in interviews with the responsible adult and/or the recipient of care, these data items are only available for recipients of care (other than the main recipient of care) where the recipient lives with the carer. Therefore, the data may exclude some primary carers who would otherwise be in-scope if age and disability status information was available for all their recipients of care.

Data for this indicator are available for primary carers only.

In the SDAC interview, primary carers are asked a series of questions about regular assistance they may receive that helps them care for the main recipient, considering both organisations and individual helpers:

1. Whether anyone usually helps to care for the main recipient (and, if so, relationship and whether lives with the carer)
2. Whether needs (more) assistance from other people to help care for the main recipient on weekdays, on weeknights or on weekends

The numerator for measure i.i relates to those primary carers who answered positively to any of the three questions in 2 above (i.e. reported a need for assistance on weekdays, weeknights and/or weekends).

The 2009 SDAC response rate for private dwellings was 89.9 per cent, and for establishments was 90.9 per cent. SDAC data are weighted to account for non-response.

The SDAC is conducted in all states and territories including people in both private and non-private dwellings (including cared-accommodation establishments) but excluding those in gaols and correctional institutions and very remote areas. The exclusion of persons usually resident in very remote areas has a small impact on estimates, except for the Northern Territory, where such persons make up a relatively large proportion of the population. For more information on SDAC scope and coverage, see the Disability, Ageing and Carers User Guide on the ABS website.

Being drawn from sample surveys, data for this indicator is subject to sampling error. Sampling error occurs because a proportion of the population is used to produce estimates that represent the whole population. Sampling error can be reliably estimated as it is calculated based on the statistical methods used to design surveys.

This indicator has varied levels of sampling error, and in some cases data are not able to be provided for confidentiality and unreliability reasons. This particularly affects data for the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and the Northern Territory (NT), and age/sex disaggregations for all states and territories. The SDAC sample in 2009 was double compared to 2003, and therefore data for 2003 may be subject to higher levels of sampling error than corresponding data in 2009.

In tables disaggregated by state, relative standard errors (RSEs) are typically less than 25 per cent for the larger states, but can be higher in some tables. For the smaller states, RSEs are typically between 25 per cent and 50 per cent, and for the territories, 50 per cent or greater.

Data with RSEs of 25 per cent to 50 per cent should be used with caution, and data with RSEs of 50 per cent or greater are considered too unreliable for general use.

Disability status is derived from information provided in interviews with the responsible adult and/or the recipient of care. In a small number of cases (about 1 per cent in 2009), the primary carer indicated that he/she provided assistance with core activities because of the main recipient’s condition(s), however the recipient did not have a reported disability (was either not identified in the disability screening questions answered by the responsible adult or, in the personal interview, stated that he/she did not need assistance with core activities). These primary carers remain in the data.

Both the numerator and the denominator are drawn from the same dataset, with the numerator being a subset of the denominator population.

Estimates of primary carers in a particular population group presented in these tables may not match estimates for primary carers in the same population group presented in other NDA indicators.

The particular specification of the in-scope primary carer population for this indicator represents only 55 per cent of the primary carer population identified in the SDAC, and therefore comparisons with other published information on primary carers sourced from the SDAC should be made with caution. Mostly, the primary carers that are out-of-scope are not included because they are not caring for someone aged 0-64 years.

In 2009, the identification process for primary carers in the SDAC was expanded to include members of the household who the recipient of care identified as their main care provider. Therefore, comparisons between 2009 data and previous years cannot be made. For further details on the methodology change see explanatory notes in Disability, Ageing and Carers, Australia: Summary of Findings, 2009 (cat. no.4430.0).