Prioritising wellbeing outcomes for social housing tenants: using fecundity to inform public policy in New Zealand

The last decade has seen increasing agreement on the measurement of wellbeing. Over this time two main approaches to measuring wellbeing nationally have emerged: multi-dimensional and subjective. Both approaches are widely used in national and international reporting. Progress on applying wellbeing measures in practice to inform policy and decision-making, however, has been less rapid. While there is a small, but growing, literature on the use of subjective wellbeing measures in public policy, there are fewer examples of applying multi-dimensional wellbeing measures in a public policy context. This paper describes wellbeing outcomes for social housing tenants from a multi-dimensional wellbeing survey drawing on the New Zealand Treasury’s Living Standards Framework. Building on the Alkire-Foster counting methodology, the paper proposes a novel metric for assessing the relative importance of different wellbeing outcomes within the context of a multi-dimensional wellbeing framework. This metric – fecundity – is defined as the number of additional dimensions of hardship that a person experiences conditional on being in hardship in one specific dimension. This fecundity metric to then compared to life satisfaction and the relationship between features of urban design and wellbeing is used as an illustrative case study to demonstrate the applicability of each approach in practice. Under both approaches neighbourhood characteristics and access to services are associated with tenant wellbeing compared to dwelling characteristics and length of connection to the neighbourhood, which have no significant association with life satisfaction and only a weak association with fecundity.