Indigenous fathers play a central role in the lives of Indigenous children growing up strong. For Australia’s Indigenous people, growing strong includes the possessing heightened levels of health, education and cultural knowledge. This article focuses on Indigenous fathers and how they understand the importance of sharing cultural activities with their children. We argue that the sharing of Indigenous cultural practices, and the subsequent telling of this narrative, are key enablers for ...

To explore sleep patterns in indigenous Australian children and assess the role of sleep timing in longitudinal changes in body mass index (BMI). Latent profile analysis was conducted with the Australian Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children (LSIC) cohort data (wave 5), to determine distinct patterns of bed and wake timing, taking account of weekday sleep duration, weekday and weekend bedtimes, and weekday wake times. Multilevel models with a random intercept were used to investigate the ...

The present thesis explores the effects of racism on Aboriginal children’s social and emotional wellbeing (SEWB) and Aboriginal pregnant women’s mental health and wellbeing. Identification of protective factors against the effects of racism on child wellbeing was also contemplated. The thesis comprises seven chapters. Chapter 1 includes a review of the literature on characteristics of the Aboriginal Australian population and the effects of racism across the lifespan. This chapter also contemp...

We investigate patterns of childcare use and its influence on the cognitive development of Indigenous children. The influence of childcare on Indigenous children's cognitive outcomes is less well understood than for non-Indigenous children due to a lack of appropriate data. We focus on a cohort of Indigenous children in Australia who have been followed from infancy and for whom rich information on childcare use and cognitive outcomes is observed. Compared to Indigenous children who never part...

This paper provides a brief summary of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, a nationally representative household panel survey. It describes the survey’s key design features, provides an overview of its content, and reports on response rates and sample sizes. It also highlights a few examples of research utilising the data, discusses two challenges currently facing the study, and provides details on how to access the data.

Participation in sport and physical activity can improve academic outcomes and has been identified as a potential mechanism for addressing educational disadvantage and 'closing the gap' in Australian Indigenous communities. To explore this possibility in relation to sport and lifestyle we performed a cluster analysis on data from the Footprints in Time study (also known as the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children), using data from Waves 3-6 (2010-2013, ages 5-9 years) of this cohort stud...

This critical systematic review of Australian research literature provides insights into the aspirations of Indigenous communities to collaborate with schools in establishing local Indigenous language and cultural programmes. This systematic review investigates the body of Australian research into the cultural, social and educational impacts on those Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander students who have had opportunities to engage with these school-based Indigenous languages and/or cultu...

In Australia and internationally, there are increasing calls for the use of strengths-based methodologies, to counter the dominant deficit discourse that pervades research, policy, and media relating to Indigenous health and wellbeing. However, there is an absence of literature on the practical application of strengths-based approaches to quantitative research. This paper describes and empirically evaluates a set of strategies to support strengths-based quantitative analysis. A case study abo...

Objective: Sport may promote academic performance through physiological and psychosocial mechanisms. We aimed to examine the association between sports participation and academic performance in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. Methods: Participants were from four successive waves of Australia’s Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children (n ¼ 303, baseline age 5–6 y). Cumulative sports participation was regressed against academic performance from two standardised tests. Res...

We study the effects of inherited socioeconomic characteristics on markers of unhealthy bodyweight. Taking Australian microdata from 2007 to 2013, we show that approximately 4% of the variation in outcomes is determined by factors beyond an individual's control, such as their race, gender, and social class. Paternal socioeconomic status is the primary explanatory factor, with those born to more affluent fathers slightly less likely to be overweight in adulthood. Decompositions reveal that onl...

We provide an overview of the integration of refugees into the labor markets of a number of high-income countries. Discussing the ways in which refugees and economic migrants are differently selected and so might be expected to perform differently in a host country's labor market, we examine employment and wages for these groups over time after arrival. There is significant heterogeneity between host countries, but in general, refugees experience persistently worse outcomes than other migrant...

The aim of this paper is to summarise existing evidence and new analyses that shed light on the role of reconciliation in schools and early learning services in particular, and in education more broadly. We present the first analysis in Australia of the relationship between racism/discrimination and cognitive development among the Indigenous Australian population, showing a negative and statistically significant longitudinal relationship. We discuss the policy implications of these findings...

The aim of this paper is to summarise existing evidence and new analyses that shed light on the role of reconciliation in schools and early learning services in particular, and in education more broadly. We present the first analysis in Australia of the relationship between racism/discrimination and cognitive development among the Indigenous Australian population, showing a negative and statistically significant longitudinal relationship. We discuss the policy implications of these findings...

Both obesity and disability have been widely recognised as major public health challenges because they play significant roles in determining self-perceived general and mental health. Longitudinal studies of the relationship between obesity and disability with self-reported health outcomes are scarce. Therefore, the objective of the present study is to examine the relationship between obesity and disability with self-perceived general and mental health among Australian adults aged 15 years and...

Criminological research has often overlooked the relationship between colonisation and historical trauma, beyond elements of social and economic disadvantage. This study aims to place Indigenous experience as central to our understanding of criminological outcomes, through examining the effect of cultural identity on substance use participation among Indigenous youth. Data was sourced from the 2018 Australian Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children (LSIC) for a sample of 422 Indigenous yo...

Energy poverty is becoming an increasingly important policy consideration in many countries. We empirically examine the relationship between energy poverty and housing tenure in Australia using HILDA survey data over the period 2005 to 2018. We employ objective, subjective and composite measures of energy poverty and control for other respondent and household covariates. Results from our study, which are robust to a suite of checks, suggest that being energy poor has a negative impact on home...

There is increasing evidence in favor of non-unitary models of the household. Moreover, gender norms and values have been shown to be transmitted across generations and to affect intra-household allocations. I lever a unique opportunity to observe each spouse’s contributions to income, market, and home hours of parents and children (after forming their own household) in China and Australia to uncover a strong positive correlation between the female spouse’s relative contributions across two g...

This article investigates the impacts of financial shocks on the role of the family home in asset portfolios of Australian households using longitudinal data from the Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey. The life events considered are serious illness or injury, death of a spouse, fired or made redundant, and separation from a spouse. We use a static and dynamic Tobit models to assess the impact and duration of the life events on the portfolio share of the family...

Personality traits have been associated with differences in residential mobility, but details are lacking on the types of residential moves associated with personality differences. The present study pooled data from four prospective cohort studies from the United Kingdom (UK Household Longitudinal Survey, and British Household Panel Survey), Germany (Socioeconomic Panel Study), and Australia (Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia) to assess whether personality traits of the Five...

Using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey together with OLS and quantile regressions, this paper examines the changing returns to education and the evolving wage structure of young adults (aged 25–34 years) between 2001 and 2019. Estimates show that real wage growth was strong for both males and females over the 2000s, underpinned by wage structure effects. Between 2010/11 and 2018/19 wage growth was flat (zero) for males and subdued for females. In...

The 2016 report of the Australian Council of Social Service (acoss) documents the widespread poverty and the precarious living conditions prevalent in numerous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. Analysing data from the 2014 Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (hilda) survey, the report states that “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were more likely to experience poverty than other Australians, and are less likely to ‘exit welfare’ than other Australia...

Lockdown edicts during the COVID-19 pandemic have led to concerns about consequences for childbirth plans and decisions. Robust empirical research to either refute or confirm these concerns, however, is lacking. To evaluate the causal impact of lockdowns on fertility, we exploited a large sample of Australians (aged 18 to 45) from a nationally representative household panel survey and leveraged variation from a unique natural experiment that occurred in Australia in 2020: a lockdown imposed i...

Within the vast body of literature on the relationship between mental disorders and life satisfaction, no satisfactory treatment has been proposed to deal with the bi-directional relationship between the two. We estimate the causal effect of depression and anxiety on life satisfaction by applying an instrumental-variable regression approach to the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey. Our identification strategy exploits regional variation in the tendency to diagn...