Summary of the Project:

The Linking4Life project involves the creation of a linked data repository containing social services datasets for Western Australia, to address complex & often interrelated issues of child abuse & neglect, justice system involvement, mental illness, disability and poverty. This is a research programme, with individual projects utilising subsets of the linked data to answer particular research questions.

The Linking4Life has received some delays in regard to data access, pushing out timelines for some associated research projects. The first project to kick off under this program is the Navigating through Life project; this project investigates the experiences and outcomes of young people as they transition from out-of-home care. The project utilises linked data from Western Australia; the list of datasets is below. Analysis for this project is expected to be completed by Nov 2023.

The project was onboarded into the SeRP environment in Dec 2021. There are currently three researchers onboarded so far. For this project as with other projects in SeRP@Curtin, we utilise SeRP’s data catalogue functionality. Linkage4Life data is stored within the data catalogue in a relational database. For each individual project, a ‘view’ of this database is created, containing only the variables and records the researcher has approval for. The researchers are then provided with a connection string for this view, which they call from their analytical software of choice, allowing them to analyse the data directly from the database.