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Housing stress and household wellbeing in Australia

Summary

This project examines whether there is a link between measures of housing stress (using the 30/40 rule) and other measures of social and economic wellbeing, including using longitudinal data.

Project Number: 80650
Research Theme: Housing_affordability
Project Leader: Rowley, Steven
Funding Year: 2011
Research Centre: Western Australia

Description

This project will seek to validate whether variations (geographical, demographic and across tenures) in housing stress correlate with similar variations in other measures of wellbeing, to evaluate the whether housing stress measures are useful for policy decision making.  Wellbeing outcomes in relation to financial security, social participation and health will be considered.

In addition, housing stress measures don’t take into account quality aspects of the house.  Householders might face housing stress in order to access appropriately sized or better quality housing while others trade off quality to avoid housing stress. This study will seek to make comparisons between a household’s degree of housing stress and the quality of their dwellings and neighbourhood conditions.

Quantitative methods will be used and both housing stress and wellbeing will be measured using the 2001-2009 Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey.

AHURI events involving this project

• Measuring housing stress and its consequences: new AHURI research — Perth, Wed 16 May 2012