WELCOME

Welcome to the first issue of Family and Community Connections.

Family and Community Connections is a twice-yearly newsletter produced by the Family and Community Statistics Section.

We called our newsletter 'Connections' to emphasise the connections that make up families and communities, and also to establish better connections with you.

In the newsletter we will inform you about the latest developments in ABS family and community statistics.

This edition celebrates National Families Week and National Volunteer Week by highlighting selected statistics to illustrate the themes of each of these weeks. We also draw your attention to the new quarterly release timetable for Australian Social Trends, the recent release of 'A Picture of the Nation', and CDATA online. Please see below for further details.

For our Confidentialised Unit Record File (CURF) users, there have been some new developments to improve the CURF application procedures.

We hope you enjoy this edition of Family and Community Connections.

Graeme Thompson
Director
Family and Community Statistics Section


AUSTRALIAN SOCIAL TRENDS IS NOW RELEASED QUARTERLY

Australian Social Trends (cat. no. 4102.0)

Australian Social Trends presents statistical analysis and commentary on a wide range of current social issues. New articles are released quarterly and are organised into eight chapters, representing the following broad areas of interest:

• population;
• family and community;
• health;
• education and training;
• work;
• economic resources;
• housing;
• and a chapter of articles covering other areas of social concern.

Each chapter is supported by a set of summary tables including key social indicators which provide an overview of social change over the past decade, as well as how social conditions differ across Australian states and territories. A set of international tables also compares Australia with 17 other nations.


A PICTURE OF THE NATION: THE STATISTICIAN'S REPORT ON THE 2006 CENSUS

A Picture of the Nation: the Statistician's Report on the 2006 Census, 2006 (cat. no. 2070.0)
The Statistician's Report analyses information collected in the 2006 Census of Population and Housing. It also incorporates information from previous censuses, in some instances going back as far as 1911. It presents stories about contemporary society and trends that affect the lives of Australian people. Drawing on the rich variety of topics covered by the Census and looking across different geographic areas and population groups, this report showcases the many strengths of Census data.


CDATA ONLINE

2006 CDATA Online (cat. no. 2064.0) is an online tool which combines information on Australian society from the 2006 Census, with web graphing and mapping capability. CDATA Online allows you to create your own tables of Census data on a range of different topics such as age, education, housing, income, transport, religion, ethnicity, occupation and more. This free online product allows you to create tables, maps and graphs of Census characteristics for all ABS geographic areas.

The product is designed to provide clients with a high degree of freedom in selecting and combining the geographical areas most suited to their needs. You can access data for areas as small as a Collection District (approximately 225 households) or as large as an entire state or territory or all of Australia. CDATA Online allows you the freedom to select and combine areas that interest you by creating your own customised geographic areas.

With CDATA Online you are able to cross-tabulate chosen Census data variables to produce a table which can also be viewed as a graph or a thematic map. Predetermined basic tables are available for selection based on broad topics via a topic list. Once a table has been created it can be further customised by adding and removing data items and geographic areas, and by creating custom data groups. Graphs and maps created in CDATA Online can be downloaded in a variety of formats, while registered users can also save created tables within CDATA Online for future retrieval.


CURF MICRODATA ACCESS

CURF Microdata News, August 2008 (cat. no. 1104.0) announced a number of developments designed to improve the CURF application process and to ease the administrative load on CURF Contact Officers and Responsible Officers. These developments include the CURF tool kits to be released on the website in September; on-line CURF application forms for release in November; and new simplified CURF Undertakings in preparation. You can find more about these developments on the website.