Trend analysis on Australian health status

The general social surveys (GSS) conducted by Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in 2002, 2006 and 2010 contain health status data collected from the participants over the country. ABS only presented a brief summary of Australian health status through simple data analysis, which provided little insight into the trends of general health status of Australians and variations of health status of different age groups over the years. In this paper, these health status data have been analyzed using some existing methods and a newly proposed method of “average residual analysis” (ARA) to identify any hidden trends and variations of health status from 2002 to 2010 in Australia. This trend analysis not only reaffirmed the previous summaries given by ABS, but also found two possible tendencies in the 2010 GSS: people who rated their health status very good or excellent became declining in the extended young-middle age groups (25-64 years old), and people in the middle age groups (35-54) were more likely to rate their health status as good, rather than as very good or excellent, compared with that in the 2002 and 2006 GSSs.