Self-rated general health
Ethnic differences
In 2006/07, young Māori and young Pacific people had significantly lower self-reported general health scores than the youth population as a whole.
Asian young people’s scores were slightly higher than those of the total youth population, though not significantly.
Self-rated general health (age-standardised ratio of mean scores on SF-36 scale) for young people aged 15 to 24, by ethnicity, 2006/07
Source: Ministry of Health, New Zealand Health Survey 2006/07, total-response ethnicity data. The horizontal gridline at 1.00 represents the total population against which comparative SF-36 mean score ratios for different ethnic groups are calculated. Where lines extending from datapoints do not cross the 1.00 gridline, this indicates a significant difference between the SF-36 mean score of an ethnic population compared to the total population.
In terms of trends, the mean scores of young people from Māori and European/other ethnic groups did not change significantly from 2002/03 to 2006/07.
The mean health scores of Pacific and Asian young people dropped over this time period.
Self-rated general health (mean scores on SF-36 scale) for young people aged 15 to 24, by ethnicity, 2002/03 and 2006/07
Source: Ministry of Health, New Zealand Health Survey 2002/03 and 2006/07. This total-response ethnicity data is age-standardised to allow comparisons between years, and rates thus differ slightly from crude rates.
Notes
We encourage you to be cautious about drawing conclusions from comparisons between ethnic groups. Apparent differences (in unadjusted data) between ethnic groups can often be explained by factors other than ethnicity per se, such as the different age, sex, geographical and socioeconomic distributions of different ethnic populations. In addition, datasets vary in the way that they collect and record ethnicity data.
