8th Biennial ACSPRI Social Science Methodology Conference

Online – via Zoom

Wednesday 23 November to Thursday 24 November 2022 (and Social-Biological Methods Symposium, Friday 25 November 2022)

One of the challenges in the social science methods space is it's dynamic nature. Given this and the need to keep abreast of changes and innovation, this conference provides the opportunity to reflect on where we've come from, highlight where we are and imagine our future as social scientists.

A unique feature of this conference is that it is multi-disciplinary and brings together researchers and methodologists from a range of environments and contexts.

The conference is organised around four themes:

1. Research paradigms and designs;
2. Research methods and techniques;
3. Research technology and tools;
4. Datasets, data collections and data archiving.

There will be two types of papers:

1. Papers / presentations where an abstract is reviewed (abstract in the conference proceedings).
2. Short videos (under 5 minutes) - including a student short video competition (abstract in the conference proceedings). Short videos of accepted abstracts have a final submission date of 16 November 2022

Keynote / Plenary Speakers

We are very pleased to announce our conference plenary speakers:

• Our opening plenary speaker is Professor Virginia Braun, University of Auckland who will present "Using (reflexive) thematic analysis: What matters for telling a good analytic story?".
• Our closing plenary speaker is Dr Shaun Ratcliff, YouGov who will present "Successes and lessons from polling at the 2022 federal election"

Timeline / Deadlines

• Late August 2022: Earlybird registration opens
• 23 September 2022: Abstract submission closes
• 14 October 2022: Earlybird registration closes
• 16 November 2022: Final date for submission of short videos
• 23 November 2022: Conference opens

How will the online conference work?

ACSPRI conference attendees are used to the intimate nature of the conference and the opportunity for small group discussion. To facilitate this as much as possible in an online environment, we want conference attendees to be active participants and join in with their webcams via Zoom.

Besides the short videos which will be available to view at any time, presentations will be live via Zoom and moderated by the session convenor. As for a normal conference presentation, there will be time for questions and discussion after presentations are made.

Depending on the number of submissions to the conference, we will do our best to schedule as few sessions concurrently as possible so you won’t miss out on presentations you would like to attend. We will also ask permission of presenters for sessions to be recorded and made available for later viewing.

Sessions start from 10:30am AEDT (Melbourne/Canberra Sydney) to allow for participation from all Australian states/territories (10:00am Adelaide, 9:30am Brisbane, 9am Darwin, 7:30am Perth).

Student short video competition (was Student Poster Competition)

• To be eligible to enter students must have their short video abstracts accepted for the conference. Each abstract should articulate your project/thesis research question and the method(s) you employ to address this.
• A prize will be awarded based on:
  • The ability to succinctly present the research question and method.
  • The content of the video presentation.
  • The quality of the visuals.
• The ACSPRI Executive Committee will judge the short video.
• The prize is a voucher to attend an ACSPRI course (valued at up to $2,120.00 *Early bird member rate)
• Short video presenters must be currently enrolled students at an ACSPRI member institution.
• Students interested in having their videos considered for the Short Video Competition must:
  • Submit an abstract by 23 September 2022
  • Indicate they would like to be considered for the prize in the submission
  • Register for the conference by the early bird deadline of 14 October 2022
  • Self produce a video in a web ready format
  • If your abstract is accepted, your final video must be submitted by 16 November 2022
  • All videos will be published on the conference website. The winner will be announced during the conference. Note: to have a video displayed on the conference website you must register and attend the conference.
• All students are eligible for the student video competition, including those that present a paper during a session, but this might be of special interest to those starting on a research project where ideas may not be developed enough for a full conference presentation.

Social-Biological Methods Symposium (Melbourne and Online, via Zoom - Friday 25 November)

ACSPRI is pleased to announce that we will be incorporating a Social-Biological Methods Symposium on Friday 25 November 2022. This follows from the successful Social-Biological Methods Festival we co-hosted at the 2018 ACSPRI conference.

Featuring international and Australian expertise in the growing field of social-biological research, this methods symposium will showcase best-practice work in this interdisciplinary area and build skills and capacity of researchers in use of social-biological methods. The symposium will be held face to face in Melbourne. Conference registrants can attend in person, or via Zoom.

Symposium keynote speakers to include (more to follow):

• 
  David H. Chae is Associate Professor in the Department of Social, Behavioral, and Population Sciences and Associate Dean for Research at Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. He is also Director of the Society, Health, and Racial Equity (SHARE) Lab. His research focuses on the social determinants of health inequities and embodiment of racism. As part of this work, he examines physiologic outcomes and biomarkers that signal dysregulation, including telomere length, a novel indicator of aging at the cell level. He examines the interplay between context, developmental period, behavior, and biology, and links to disease susceptibility and progression. He studies racism as a social-environmental toxin that shapes the inequitable population-level distribution of disease through the development and application of place-based measures of structural and systemic inequity. David serves on several scientific research groups dedicated to the study of racism. In 2019 he was elected to the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, the honorary senior scientist society for those whose research is at the interface of behavior and medicine.
• 
  Jourdyn Lawrence is a social epidemiologist and Health and Human Rights Fellow at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard. Her work primarily addresses racism as a cause of racial health inequities in the United States, with an explicit focus on the processes of the embodiment of discrimination to affect chronic health and aging-related outcomes. Jourdyn’s doctoral research examined measurement and methodological approaches in assessing how discrimination "gets under the skin" to affect blood pressure and biomarker outcomes. Her current work explores the implications of interpersonal and structural racism on aging and cognitive-related outcomes. Jourdyn also examines how monetary reparations for the enslavement of Africans in the U.S. would alter the premature and overall mortality outcomes of Black adults as part of the FXB Center’s Making the Public Health Case for Reparations project, which is supported by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Jourdyn studied social epidemiology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and holds a PhD in Population Health Sciences from Harvard University. She earned her MSPH in Epidemiology from the University of South Carolina and her BS in Biology from Clayton State University. Jourdyn is also an affiliate of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University.
• 
  Tarani Chandola is a Professor of Medical Sociology. He is the director of the Methods Hub in the Faculty of the Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. He joined the Department of Sociology in August 2021 and was formerly the Head of Department of Social Statistics at the University of Manchester. He is a co-director of the ESRC International Centre for Lifecourse Studies in Society and Health http://www.ucl.ac.uk/icls/, a member of the ESRC Strategic Advisory Network Strategic Advisory Network - Economic and Social Research Council (ukri.org), a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences https://www.acss.org.uk/ and the Royal Statistical Society https://rss.org.uk/ . He obtained his DPhil in Sociology from Nuffield College, University of Oxford in 1998. His research is primarily on the social determinants of health, focusing on health inequalities and psychosocial factors, and the analysis of longitudinal cohort studies.
• Professor Naomi Priest, ANU and Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Australia

Registration

• Registration is now open. Registration gives you access to the conference (online via Zoom) and the Social-Biological Methods Symposium on Friday 25 November (online via Zoom included, in person optional extra).
• Click through for registration via the ACSPRI website:
  -- Full time student at an ACSPRI member institution: $40
  -- Employee or non-full time student at an ACSPRI member institution: $80
  -- All others: $200
  -- Optional and additional: In person registration for Social-Biological Methods Symposium 25 November (Ella Latham Auditorium, Royal Children's Hospital, 50 Flemington Rd, Melbourne, 8:30am until 5pm: $50

Contact

Conference organiser: Adam Zammit, ACSPRI
Email: conference@acspri.org.au
Phone: 03 9013 9653

Sponsors

Major sponsor: The Social Research Centre

Major sponsor: Survey Design and Analysis Services Pty Ltd (SDAS)

Please contact conference@acspri.org.au for a sponsor prospectus