Final report - Integrated Land Management Bureau

3.0 CHALLENGES AND LIMITATIONS
There are several serious challenges and limitations in choosing a framework and
selecting measurable indicators for human well-being on the North and Central Coast.
These challenges affect the choice of indicators and their reliability for measuring
changes in human well-being over time.
3.1 SCALE AND BOUNDARY OVERLAP IN EXISTING DATA
It is a challenge to balance the theoretical approach to human well-being found in the
literature with the reality of selecting indicators for which there is existing data or where
collection of data in the plan area is feasible and affordable. The choice of indicators
depends in part on the tolerance for imprecision in the data—how precise they need to be
to be useful and satisfactory for decision making. Much data from BC Stats and Statistics
Canada are free or very inexpensive, but often not precise because of scale and
overlapping boundary problems. In some cases, because the population is small enough,
census data are suppressed (not compiled) by Statistics Canada or BC Stats, leaving gaps
in information for certain communities in the plan area, especially on the Central Coast.
For example, Statistics Canada and the Canadian Institute for Health Information
compiled a research-based list of human health indicators, but the data for these
indicators are only available at a very broad Health Region level. Some indicators, such
as self-reported health status, are only available at an even larger provincial scale. Given
that the North and Central coast plan areas are smaller geographic subsets of the Health
Regions, Statistics Canada health data were not useful. The most localized source of
health data for the North and Central coast plan areas is BC Stats at the Local Health
Area (LHA) scale, however there is a trade-off between using appropriate scales and
using indicators where the numbers are too small to detect changes meaningfully over
time. Using LHAs forces the use of BC Stats indicators (see Appendix A for a map of the
Local Health Areas) which lead to very small numbers of respondents.
The Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) that is conducted every two years
offers a wide array of health indicators, but the data also are only available at the Health
Region level. According to Statistics Canada, it is technically possible to “drill down”
and obtain the data by postal code, but the confidence interval would be very poor and
results would have low statistical reliability because of the small sample size used in the
survey (Statistics Canada only surveys 130,000 people across the country for the CCHS).
If data were to be made available the local level, the chance for error in reporting from
one time period to the next would be significant. The data could show a significant
improvement over time that did not occur, or it could show that things got worse in an
area even if they did not.
Existing data for the North and Central Coast have limitations as follows:
1) Health data at Local Health Area level (LHAs): Local Health Areas are
the most localized data available on health statistics, but the LHA
boundaries do not follow the plan area boundaries, making it difficult to
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