As a National Seniors member, there’s a good chance you’ve been invited to participate in one of our National Seniors Social Surveys (NSSS) in the past.

If you’ve taken time to complete one of these surveys, you may be wondering what happens to your responses after you submit them. 

So, who are the National Seniors Research team, what do we do, and what impact do your survey responses have?

Let’s take a closer look.

Our research provides the hard evidence on which many National Seniors advocacy campaigns are built, helping contribute to government policy change.

A great example is our Let Pensioners Work campaign, which achieved extensive media coverage in the lead up to the 2022 Federal Election in May, and continues to attract attention as we approach the Federal Budget in October. 

At the heart of this campaign are statistics you may have heard—that 20% of pensioners would consider re-entering paid work and 60% of those are motivated by earning money.

Our Chief Advocate Ian Henschke recounted stories he’d heard from pensioners struggling financially and others who want to fill worker shortages but can’t because of prohibitive pension rules. These stories and figures came directly from older Australians’ responses to our NSSS earlier this year.

Both longer-term, rigorous reports and shorter-term campaign materials are important aspects of the Research team’s job. We had barely closed the NSSS when the federal election was called, so we moved quickly to calculate relevant statistics and identify pertinent quotes from the written comments you provided.

We’ve since written a much more detailed, full-length report on the topic of post-retirement work, based on your survey responses.

As well as supporting National Seniors’ advocacy work, our research feeds into government processes. We deliver our reports to reach senior public servants and government consultations for their consideration in developing new policies.

For example, when the Department of Health consulted on its aged care accommodation framework in 2021, National Seniors provided a submission for improving aged care based on hundreds of suggestions from our survey participants. Additionally, this year, when the Department consulted us on its proposed new digital health platform, we presented evidence of older people’s technological abilities and preferences based on our survey data on that topic.

Feedback we receive from public servants emphasises how invaluable our research is to processes like these. Our research has been cited in influential policy documents such as the Treasury’s 2020 Retirement Income Review and the 2021 Final Report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety.

Our work also informs private sector practice. Through our research into older Australians’ financial needs, we have practical input into how research partner Challenger manages its retirement income products in the age of the Retirement Income Covenant.

The primary research tool we use is the annual National Seniors Social Survey, or NSSS. Each year, we survey thousands of members and other older Australians with questions relevant to wellbeing, lifestyle, and current issues.

From every NSSS we publish multiple research reports and other documents. Based on the 2021 NSSS results, we published seven full research reports (with one still to come), along with government inquiry submissions, conference presentations, and articles for National Seniors’ Connect email newsletter and Our Generation magazine.

Our reports are freely available for download here or can be printed upon request for members who don’t have internet access. If you participated in a previous year’s NSSS or one of our smaller, single-topic surveys, why not browse a report based on that survey to see where your responses fit?

We also quote a lot of survey participant comments in our reports and sometimes incorporate one into the title. One of your comments may even have been immortalised this way.

While the National Seniors Head Office is based in Brisbane, the Research team are based in Canberra in a charming 1930s building close to Parliament House.

Overseeing the team is National Seniors’ CEO, Professor John McCallum. John was already an esteemed researcher on ageing in his career prior to National Seniors, having completed his PhD at Oxford on the topic of work-to-retirement for British Leyland car workers and civil servants. As a diligent Director of Research, John oversees higher level tasks like determining research directions, along with reading, editing, and approving everything the research team produces, and fronting the media to promote our research.

The heart of the research team is Senior Research Officer Dr Diane Hosking. Diane completed her PhD at the University of Adelaide on the topic of how people’s diet across their lifetime affects their thinking and memory in older age. Diane oversees the team’s work, designs the research program, determines what projects the team work on and what questions we ask. She is also the team’s quantitative data expert, conducting most of the statistical research we publish. If you ticked boxes or selected options in a recent National Seniors survey, Diane will have performed calculations on your answers to identify significant patterns and illustrate them in graph form.

Research Officer Dr Lindy Orthia is the team’s qualitative data expert. Lindy completed her PhD at the Australian National University in science communication, examining representations of science and scientists in popular fiction. She analyses the written data to examine and summarise key themes. If you wrote a comment in a recent survey, Lindy almost certainly read and categorised it.

Occasionally, the team brings in additional specialists to analyse specific datasets such as Nicole Ee and Dr Janet Maccora—two researchers whose names you might have seen on our reports.

If you like what you’re hearing and want to support our research, there are two great ways to do this. 

The first is to participate in our annual NSSS and our other research activities when relevant to your circumstances. Without older Australians sharing their experiences and opinions, we have no data to analyse and nothing to contribute to advocacy, policy, and practice.

The second is to maintain your membership and encourage others to join National Seniors or simply to make a small annual donation.

As a not-for-profit organisation, the generous financial support of members and supporters is a critical component of National Seniors’ annual budget. Our research would not be possible without it.