In 2023, it is with much pride that National Seniors Australia celebrates 15 continuous years of research about older people in this country. 

By the end of this year, we will have published 121 full research reports.  

They are the foundation evidence of innumerable documents we’ve prepared over the years that translate the research into different formats for members, media, government, industry, academics, and others including the older population in general.

We heartily thank the National Seniors membership for supporting this body of work, which is designed to put your experiences and sentiments front and centre within the Australian ageing sector.

Read on to find out a little bit more about our research history.

In August 2008, National Seniors published a document called AdvantAGE Australia: Maximising the potential of an ageing population, to coincide with the centenary of the Australian Pension. 

The document was prepared in response to public discussion about the ageing population. It outlined the challenges this may present in terms of economics, health, and social aspects of our lives, and recommendations for policy changes to respond to these. 

As the National Seniors Chair, Everald Compton, wrote to then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd: 

“It is intended that AdvantAGE Australia will be widely promoted and that it will be used to generate positive debate, new ideas and a carefully formulated plan to change ageing from a liability to an asset as it impacts on every strata of Australian life.”

Ever since then, National Seniors research has sought to continue that vision.

In May the following year, the National Seniors Productive Ageing Centre (NSPAC) put out a pair of reports covering research conducted by the Eidos Institute, an independent think-tank based in Queensland and northern New South Wales.

The reports examined the economic and social contributions older people make to Australian society through paid work, volunteering, and caring.

Part of their evidence-base was National Seniors members’ views, gathered at facilitated workshops in Brisbane and Canberra.

From then through to 2013, NSPAC’s primary research role was to commission and fund external researchers to conduct research for National Seniors. During this period, in-house research was much less common for our organisation as the graph below shows.

That started to change in 2014, with National Seniors researchers conducting more of our own research.

Today, almost all research reports published by National Seniors are based on projects conducted by our in-house Research Team who are dedicated full time to this task.

This arrangement helps keep the research program consistent, continuous, and responsive to members’ concerns.

These days, most of our research is conducted via the annual National Seniors Social Survey, or NSSS.

But when it made its first appearance in 2012, the NSSS was only used as the basis for a few research reports, because externally conducted research was still dominating our agenda.

As the years went on, our reliance on the NSSS increased, as this graph shows.

In large part, that was an ethical decision to avoid overburdening National Seniors members with constant requests to participate in different studies – minimising what is known as “survey fatigue”. 

However, the Research Team still continues to draw on other sources of evidence as appropriate.

For example, in 2020, most of our COVID-related research was based on member comments submitted to special callouts from our former Director of Research and CEO, Professor John McCallum, and we didn’t run an NSSS that year.

The difficult and uncertain times we lived in then called for a gentler approach.

We also collaborate with external academic researchers on some projects, such as 2023’s report on Advanced Driver Assistance Systems.

From the start, our research has responded to current events, policy debates, member interests, and questions of importance to the field of gerontology or ageing research.

We have revisited some topics repeatedly as you can see from the graph below, either comparing outcomes across time or taking a different angle on the same broad issue.