Use of homelessness services by contemporary ex-serving Australian Defence Force members 2011–17

Box 1: Factors to consider when reading this report

The scope of this report is restricted to data about use of homelessness services collected as part of the SHSC. The SHSC contains information on people seeking services from agencies that receive funding to provide SHS under the (former) National Affordable Housing Agreement or the National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness. This report does not include information on ex-serving ADF members who may have experienced homelessness but did not seek support from a SHS agency.

The scope of this report is restricted to ex-serving ADF SHS clients with at least 1 day of service since 1 January 2001, who discharged after 1 January 2001 and before 1 July 2017. As a result, this report cannot be used to estimate the use of homelessness services by ex-serving members who left the ADF before 1 January 2001.

The analysis in this report links the PMKeyS and SHSC data using a SLK. The SLK is a combination of letters and numbers taken from an individual’s personal information, which is used to match individuals across data sets. While the SLK methodology is a robust approach to match individuals between data sources, it may miss some matches or make incorrect matches that may not have occurred if the full identifiable information was used.

The scope of this report is restricted to SHS use that occurred between 1 July 2011 and 30 June 2017. As the contemporary ex-serving ADF population consists of ex-serving ADF members who discharged on or after 1 January 2001, the maximum length of time between discharge and SHS use is 16 years (that is, a person who discharged in 2001 and used SHS for the first time in 2017). As such, the analysis population is limited to those who used SHS within 16 years of their discharge. Any demographic or service characteristics associated with SHS use more than 16 years after discharge will not be captured in this report. In addition, demographic or service characteristics associated with SHS use many years after discharge may be under-represented.

The scope of this report is restricted to SHS use that occurred after an ADF member was discharged. Data for SHS use that occurs prior to the financial year in which an ex-serving ADF member was discharged are not included in this report.

Data on homelessness support provided before 1 July 2011 are not available, which means the total days of support may be underestimated for clients already receiving accommodation or other homelessness support on 1 July 2011. Similarly, some clients may have continued to receive SHS support beyond 30 June 2017, but this information is not within the scope of this report. The data for 2016–17 was the most recent financial year of data available at the time of data linkage for this report.

In this report, counts of clients are reported for each individual financial year, and across the 6-year reporting period (2011–12 to 2016–17). For some analyses, the total number of clients for each individual financial year will sum to greater than the total number of unique clients in the 6-year period as clients may receive several services over multiple years and can be counted in the total for each financial year in which they received SHS support. 

Ex-serving ADF SHS client counts are unweighted and under-estimate the number of clients. Unlike national SHS client data (such as that presented in the Specialist homelessness services annual report 2017–18), no imputation strategy has been applied to correct for missing or incomplete data.

Two different extracts of Australian SHS client data were sourced for the analysis for this report. The first is data from the Specialist homelessness services annual report 2017–18. These data have several key methodological differences compared with the ex-serving ADF SHS client data, such as the inclusion of clients under the age of 16; and the inclusion of clients in outcome data only if all of their support periods have closed by the end of the year. Because of this, data from this extract are included in the report to provide context to the ex-serving ADF results by showing patterns of SHS use in the Australian population, rather than for direct comparison. 

The second is the unweighted proportion of Australians aged 17 and over who had used SHS from 2011–12 to 2016–17. These data are only used to compare the level of SHS use among ex-serving ADF members with the level among the general Australian population. These data are unweighted (no imputation strategy has been applied to correct for missing or incomplete data), so these counts under-estimate the number of SHS clients. These data also represent a unique count of clients across 6 financial years, so the counts will not be comparable to data published for individual financial years. These data were sourced from a customised data request and are not published elsewhere.

There are differences in the methodology of how the analysis for the current report identifies ADF members, compared with the ADF indicator:

• The ADF indicator includes veterans who discharged before 1 January 2001 and applies to currently serving or former ADF members. 
• The ADF indicator is self-reported and will only capture ADF members who identify themselves as such to the SHS agency. This report identifies ex-serving ADF SHS clients by linking the SHSC data with the Department of Defence’s PMKeyS data. 
• The ADF indicator is only asked of clients aged 18 and over, whereas this report contains ex-serving ADF members aged 17. 

It was not possible to analyse a number of other potentially important social, demographic and psychological factors that may contribute to homelessness, due to a number of factors including the specific administrative information available in the PMKeyS data.

The results may indicate some groups of ex-serving ADF SHS clients that may be at higher risk of homelessness by examining characteristics that may be associated with homelessness. However, it is not possible to attribute a causal relationship between these characteristics and homelessness.