We have a single planned outcome: Increased understanding of factors affecting how families function by conducting research and communicating findings to policy makers, service providers and the broader community.

To achieve this outcome, we:

• conduct high-quality research relevant to policy and practice on a broad range of issues regarding the wellbeing of Australian families
• through collaborative partnerships, expand the national knowledge base of factors affecting families
• increase the effectiveness of communications to foster greater understanding about factors that affect families
• build organisational capacity to achieve research and communication objectives.

We operated within a continuing environment of fiscal restraint in this reporting period. This has primarily affected the ability of other organisations to initiate and fund new projects, which in turn resulted in a decrease in research outputs (see Table 1 ) for performance criteria. Despite these constraints, most of the indicators exceeded their targets, demonstrating that we continue to perform at a high level and achieve our stated outcome.