The Social Investment Measurement Map (SIMM) is a tool that allows users to see what indicators or measures are available to assess interventions before they access the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI)(external link).
Originally the SIMM was a table in a memo to show what could be measured for the social housing test case. However, multiple agencies requested the document as they didn’t have any starting point to see what was in the IDI. While there are dictionaries available for most of the datasets, some of them are available exclusively in the IDI (requiring IDI access) and most of the documents would be over 50 pages. The latest version of the SIMM is designed to place all that information into a single, easy to use tool.
We foresee it being used by a team to discuss what measures can be used to assess how the effectiveness of an intervention. This will allow teams to quickly scope a project by choosing indicators and measures that are readily available. The tool is dynamic and allows users to quickly filter or search for relevant information that they wish to look at for their particular project.
The SIMM can show you what measures are available in the Social Investment Analytical Layer (SIAL) and in the IDI.
One of the columns in the SIMM is the table column. If the measure can be created from SIAL then you will find the measure in a SIAL Events tables. If the measure is available in the IDI then you will find it available in one of the IDI table.
You can also see what type of measures are available for each indicator. These could include costs, durations, counts or recency information. Some of these measures are illustrated in the SIAL video for a fictitious person named Sam.
Let’s say we were working on a project that was to assess the effectiveness of an intervention for vulnerable children and we had never used the IDI before. We could use the SIMM to quickly answer questions about what we could measure for these children. A few suggestions include:
The Social Investment Measurement Map table has been filtered for the search terms "child immunised"
If you are wanting more specific information Meetadata(external link) is an information sharing workspace for the IDI that has a discussion board where you can asked detailed questions to agency experts.
If you need access to Meetadata, you can request it by emailing meetadata@stats.govt.nz.
This first iteration of the SIMM was originally part of a social housing memo to illustrate what could be measured using the IDI and SIAL.
The next iteration took feedback from stakeholders external to SIU to create a SIMM that is dynamic. Filter and search functionality has been incorporated to quickly locate measures. Topics have been created to categorise related measures and additional columns have been requested by the stakeholders.
Note that there may be some minor errors or omissions. It is hoped by releasing version early and often these will quickly be picked up.
The next iteration aims to:
