Employment trajectories of disabled people in New Zealand
Every career has a story, but for many disabled people in New Zealand, that story has been shaped by barriers rather than opportunity. At the WorkBridge Foundation, we are all about changing that—using rich, real-world data to understand how people move through the labour market and what helps them thrive, while uncovering what’s holding employers back from making inclusion the norm.
We are pleased to be partnering with NZ Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) and through their Public Good Programme, the Foundation is co-funding research on the employment trajectories of disabled people. An integral part of the research will include NZIER accessing the Statistics New Zealand Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI), a large database that holds de-identified micro data about people and households.
The key deliverables of the research are:
- Literature review report
This project component would provide a summary of previously published empirical investigations of disabled people’s employment trajectories and identify a conceptual framework and/or methodology for subsequent empirical investigation. The objective is to identify conceptual and empirical approaches to the research question, including which population groupings may be important, how to characterise employment trajectories, and how to define key outcomes (e.g. stable employment, unstable employment, etc).
- Descriptive analysis of relevant IDI data
This project component would describe the initial data exploration and provide an assessment of how the relevant groups and trajectories can be captured, as well as any recommendations for altering the methodology or definitions for improved fit with NZ data. The key deliverable is a report describing the key employment trajectories for disabled people in New Zealand, informed by the literature review.
NZIER Insight 124 Disabled peoples labour market trajectories.pdf