Future analysis directions
Future considerations
The Multi-Agency Data Integration Project (MADIP) data asset contains many other datasets that are available for analysis. Future analysis will explore:
- Personal Income Tax (PIT) data from the Australian Tax Office (ATO)
- Data Over Multiple Individual Occurrences (DOMINO) from the Department of Social Services (DSS)
This will complement the income analysis conducted in this report, and will help to understand the income situation of ADF members, particularly those in need of financial assistance.
Further breakdowns of data sourced from DVA and Defence, such as whether a veteran is a DVA client or information on their ADF service deployment experience could also provide valuable insights.
In collaboration with Defence, analysis of ex-serving ADF members linked to MADIP is anticipated to expand to a broader ex-serving ADF population, to include those who served since 1 January 1985. This expansion in the study population will help to address some of the limitations noted in this report such as the small number of suicides which limits the presentation of statistical findings (for example, ex-serving ADF females could potentially be explored). It is hoped that the expanded cohort may also allow further multi-variate factor analysis techniques to be used, beyond the limited univariate factor analysis in this report, i.e. to better identify the factors most strongly associated with suicide death in the ex-serving ADF population over time when all other available factors are accounted for.
A further opportunity would be to analyse suicide ideality and/or intentional self-harm as this report only includes deaths by suicide.