Advantage and Disadvantage: The Concepts

The four indexes of SEIFA each capture a slightly different concept of socio-economic advantage and disadvantage.

The Index of Relative Disadvantage identifies and ranks areas in terms of their relative socio-economic disadvantage. The Index of Relative Advantage and Disadvantage broadly measures both advantage and disadvantage, while the Index of Education and Occupation and the Index of Economic Resources both measure particular aspects of socio-economic advantage and disadvantage.

It is therefore important to clarify what is meant by relative socio-economic advantage and disadvantage, as this is the concept SEIFA aims to summarise from the numerous Census variables available for analysis.

For SEIFA 2011, the notion of relative socio-economic advantage and disadvantage is the same as that used for SEIFA 2006. That is, the ABS broadly defines relative socio-economic advantage and disadvantage in terms of
For more detail and discussion on where the ABS definition sits with other conceptualisations of advantage and disadvantage, see Chapter 2 of the Technical Paper.



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