8th Biennial ACSPRI Social Science Methodology Conference

Andrew Ward

Andrew has almost 20 years of experience as a statistician and quantitative researcher, with particular expertise in survey research, analysis and reporting. His interests and capabilities include cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys, survey weighting and estimation, psychometrics and small area methods.

He has completed a Bachelor of Applied Science in mathematics and statistics at the Queensland Institute of Technology, a Diploma in Education at The University of Queensland, and a Master of Applied Science by research and thesis at the Queensland University of Technology. He is an Accredited Statistician and full member of the Statistical Society of Australia.

  • Combining Census and survey data to create reliable local-area estimates
Ann Dadich

Associate Professor Ann Dadich is affiliated with the Western Sydney University School of Business. She is also a registered psychologist and a full member of the Australian Psychological Society. A/Prof. Dadich has accumulated considerable expertise in health service management, notably knowledge translation. This encompasses scholarship on the processes through which different knowledges coalesce to promote quality care. This is demonstrated by her publishing record, with approximately 200 refereed publications; the research grants she has secured; and the awards she has received. A/Prof. Dadich holds editorial appointments with several academic journals, including the Australian Health Review and the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. She is also the Deputy Director of the Sydney Partnership for Health, Education, Research and Enterprise Knowledge Translation Strategic Platform; she serves on the Australian Consortium for Social and Political Research Incorporated (ACSPRI) Executive Committee; she is a member of the Board of the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management (ANZAM); she chairs the ANZAM Research Committee; she chairs the ANZAM Health Management and Organisation Conference Stream; and she convenes the ANZAM Health Management and Organisation Special Interest Group. She supervises doctoral candidates and teaches undergraduate units on change management, innovation, creativity, and organisational behaviour.

  • Making together: A methodology in the making
  • Enabling care in healthcare improvement through video-reflexive ethnography
Anna Scovelle

Anna Scovelle is a Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Family Studies where she manages content design and survey methodology for Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. Anna has a background in public health, social epidemiology, and psychology research.
While working at AIFS, Anna is also completing her PhD in Social Epidemiology at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne. Her PhD is funded by an NHMRC Postgraduate Scholarship and examines how gender equality and the division of labour in the family setting impacts sleep and health outcomes.

  • Thinking Outside the Closet: Opening the Door to Queer Representation in Longitudinal Research
Anne Johnson

After growing up on a farm and studying to be an agronomist, during my early career working in extension and communication roles, I often saw a disconnect between farming practice and researcher ideals. After working in agroecological research for a number of years, when the PhD opportunity arose, I decided to focus on combining the experience of my farming background with my agroecological research experience to design a cross-disciplinary research project. As others have stated, to solve wicked problems we cannot use traditional methods, and researchers from diverse backgrounds need to have a common language and I hope this PhD can contribute those agricultural sustainabilty.

  • Using interviews to understand agroecological practices in the Australian viticultural context
Assoc Professor David Chae

Dr David H. Chae is Associate Professor in the Department of Social, Behavioural, 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, behaviour, and biology, and links to disease susceptibility and progression.

  • Racism and the Unjust Population-Level Distribution of Disease: Social and Psychobiological Mechanisms of Health Inequities
  • Panel discussion and Q&A – What is the future of biosocial research?
Benjamin Phillips

Dr Benjamin Phillips is Chief Survey Methodologist at the Social Research Centre and has over 17 years of experience in social research. He develops and applies survey methodology for Social Research Centre projects, including Life in Australia™, Australia’s only probability online panel, the Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching [QILT] suite of surveys for the Australian Government Department of Education, Skills and Employment, the Monash University/Scanlon Foundation Mapping Social Cohesion Survey and the Lowy Institute Poll.

  • Recruiting Life in Australia™ using ABS, IVR and SMS Push-to-Web
  • The Integrated Public Number Database: An Alternate Telephone Frame for Population Health and Commonwealth Public Policy Surveys
Christy Noble
  • Enabling care in healthcare improvement through video-reflexive ethnography
David Hua

I am an interdisciplinary researcher whose expertise lies at the intersection of computer science and law. I am passionate about the interplay of technology and human society and the impact this dynamic has on our lives. My work focuses on understanding how artificial intelligence systems can be developed, evaluated, and regulated to be trustworthy and responsible so that they may augment human decision-making and optimise outcomes for the social good and public interest. This demands synthesising the insights and methods of different disciplines to arrive at a holistic, nuanced solution to wicked problems that cannot be reached using the perspective of one discipline. The configurational, cross-case approach of qualitative comparative analysis is of particular interest and value to my work.

  • Using slider scales for fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA): a fuzzy-set-theoretic approach to measuring degrees of membership
David White

David is a director with Survey Design and Analysis Services, the distributor of Stata in Australia, Indonesia and New Zealand.
Laura provides technical support for Stata users in Australia and New Zealand. She is passionate about Stata and works closely with David to develop the SDAS Stata 17 Webinar series which has been running for more than 12 months.

  • Presenting information created in Stata
Deborah Louwen

As the Cohort Manager in the Longitudinal and Lifecourse Studies team, Deborah develops and implements respondent engagement strategies with a view to increase participant affinity and loyalty. She has over 10 years’ experience in establishing and designing study materials and incentive initiatives.

Deborah has previously worked on many longitudinal studies including, the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) study; Ten to Men: The Australian Longitudinal Study on Male Health, and Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC).

  • Altruistic incentives: why participants want more than dollars and cents
Diane Herz

Ms Diane Herz is a seasoned practitioner and leader in survey and policy research with more than 3 decades of experience in government and consulting roles in the USA. In her most recent role at Mathematica Policy Research she had the dual responsibilities of Vice President and Director of Mathematica's Human Services Division and as the company's Chief Diversity Officer. Prior to Mathematica, Diane was an economist with the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). During her 21-year tenure at the BLS she served first as an economic analyst and later as director of the American Time Use Survey and the Current Population Survey (similar to the Monthly Labour Force Survey in Australia). She is a graduate of the Federal Executive Institute’s Leadership for a Democratic Society program and of the Tuck School at Dartmouth’s Leadership for Strategic Impact program. Diane has also held leadership positions in the survey industry, including as president of the Washington Statistical Society and as chair of the American Statistical Association’s Committee on LGBT concerns.

  • Panel discussion and Q&A – What is the future of biosocial research?
Dr Catherine Hastings

Catherine Hastings is a sociologist and Research Fellow in the Law School at Macquarie University. She has an established applied social research and evaluation consultancy, which she pursues alongside scholarly research on homelessness, disadvantage and legal need.

  • Critical realist empirical research: operationalising a philosophy as a methodology in quantitative research
Dr Hazel Keedle

Dr Hazel Keedle is a Lecturer and Academic Program Advisor of the Bachelor of Midwifery and has completed her PhD in 2021 in the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Western Sydney University. Hazel has more than two decades of experience as a clinician in nursing and midwifery, educator and researcher. Her research focusses on midwifery practice/education and women’s experience of maternity care. Hazel's work is recognised nationally and internationally, with more than 40 conference and seminar presentations including 14 as an invited speaker. Hazel has a developing publication track record as an early career researcher, with 14 peer reviewed publications and has been awarded the ACM NSW Pat Brodie research scholarship to develop a smartphone application in her PhD research. Hazel is passionate about improving support for women during pregnancy, birth and the early transition to mothering.

  • Using poetic inquiry to give voice to women who had a traumatic birth through bearing witness
Dr Jade Bilardi

Dr Jade Bilardi is an ARC Decra Senior Research Fellow in the Central Clinical School at Monash University and an honorary Research Fellow in the Department of General Practice at the University of Melbourne.

Dr Bilardi is a social researcher who specialises in women's sexual and reproductive health. Her primary area of interest centres on the psychosocial health and wellbeing of women, partners and family affected by miscarriage. She also undertakes research in the areas of pregnancy and birth, early parenthood, STI's and sexual health & wellbeing.

  • Miscarriage Australia: The use of a human centred design approach to design and develop a website to support those affected by miscarriage.
Dr Jourdyn Lawrence

Dr Jourdyn Lawrence is an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. She joined the Dornsife School of Public Health at part of the Drexel FIRST (Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation) program. 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. Dr. Lawrence received her PhD in Population Health Sciences from Harvard University and a Master of Science in Public Health (MSPH) in Epidemiology from the University of South Carolina.

  • Understanding pathways to embodiment: Racism and health
  • Panel discussion and Q&A – What is the future of biosocial research?
Dr Meredith O’Connor

Dr Meredith O'Connor is an educational and developmental psychologist. Her research investigates the development of optimal mental health over the life course. This includes both mental health challenges, and the mental health strengths and assets that allow people to thrive. She has a particular focus on how adversity undermines the development of optimal mental health, and what schools can do to promote it. To investigate how mental health unfolds, she uses powerful data from longitudinal cohort studies, including the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children and Australian Temperament Project.

  • The Melbourne Children’s LifeCourse Initiative: A powerful data resource for exploring social-biological pathways
  • Panel discussion and Q&A – What is the future of biosocial research?
Dr Michael de Percy FCILT

Dr Michael de Percy FCILT is Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Canberra. His qualifications include a PhD in Political Science from the Australian National University, a Bachelor of Philosophy (Honours) from the University of Canberra, and a Bachelor of Arts from Deakin University. He is a graduate of the Royal Military College, Duntroon, where he received the Royal Australian Artillery prize. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport and Vice-Chair of the ACT and Southern NSW Chapter, a board member of the Telecommunications Association (TelSoc - Australia's oldest learned society), an editor of the Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy, and a Petherick Reader at the National Library of Australia. Michael was appointed to the Australian Research Council's College of Experts in 2022.

His research focuses on comparative politics, historical institutionalism, government-business relations, transport and telecommunications policy, and leadership. His recent publications include Politics, Policy and Public Administration in Theory and Practice: Essays in honour of Professor John Wanna, ANU Press, 2021 (with Andrew Podger and Sam Vincent); Populism and a New World Order (in Viktor Jakupec et. al. Rethinking Multilateralism in Foreign Aid, Routledge 2020); and Road Pricing and Provision: Changed Traffic Conditions Ahead, ANU Press 2018 (with John Wanna).

Michael's research articles have been published in Policy Studies, the Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy, the Australian Journal of Social Issues, the Australasian Transport and Research Forum, and Public Administration Today. His expert commentary has been published in The Australian, ABC's The Drum, The Canberra Times, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Conversation, and he has also appeared on numerous television and radio news programs.

Michael's blog Le Flâneur Politique (ISSN 2652-8851) and podcast on his research, teaching and community engagement activities are available at www.politicalscience.com.au and you can follow him on twitter @madepercy.

  • Historical Institutionalism as Method: Applications and Uses at the Micro, Meso, and Macro Levels of Analysis
Eileen Joy

Eileen Joy is a Registered Social Worker who has recently finished writing her PhD in social work. As part of that PhD research Eileen has a keen interest in the way that knowledges are structured and used in child welfare work. In particular, her PhD topic involves exploring how child development knowledges and sciences have been operationalised in the policy and practice of child protection social workers in Aotearoa New Zealand through the 2010s. Eileen also lectures in Social Work at the University of Auckland, is a Research Fellow at the University of Waikato, and has a long history of working and volunteering in women’s health and advocacy. She is passionate about issues involving epistemic (in)justice, gender and sexuality, children, families, and structural oppressions.

  • Generative interregnums: Slowing research down and taking breaks
Emerick Chew

As a Data Analyst of the team that manages the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) at NCVER, Emerick's work largely involves data processing, the integration and production of metadata, and developing LSAY data products. He has also been involved in analysing various data collection and undertaking research projects conducted at NCVER.

  • Understanding the linked LSAY-NAPLAN data
Federica Valbusa

Federica Valbusa, Ph.D. is Senior researcher at the Department of Human Sciences of the University of Verona (Italy). Her research interests concern qualitative methods in educational research, ethical education and emotional education. She is involved in "The Nous Project", designed to engage primary school children in the practice of emotional self-understanding, and in "MelArete" project, designed to engage kindergarten and primary school children in reflecting about ethical concepts and experiences.

  • The Educative Research in School: Design, Ethics and Method
Francisca Borquez

Francisca graduated from ANU Master of Social Research in 2010. Francisca has been involved in various research related work for the last 11 years in both academia and industry, with a focus on Social Network Analysis (SNA), computational social science as well as quantitative and qualitative methods. As part of the VOSON Lab, she has assisted in diverse research projects and has collaborated with open-source software developed at the lab. Her research interests are online social and organisational networks, online behaviour, computational methods and experimental social research.

  • An interdisciplinary approach to understanding Indigenous Australian governance networks
Gillian Cornish

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow working on CSIRO's Valuing Sustainability Future Science Platform, a transdisciplinary team of researchers investigating the future of sustainability. I am contributing to the Knowledge Commons project that examines the challenge of moving from gathering data about sustainability to co-producing coherent and cohesive knowledge with sustainability decision-makers. The impact of this project builds knowledge infrastructure to maximise the chances that our investments in data and information result in useful (and used) sustainability knowledge.

I am a human geographer interested in how different groups of society interact with broader institutional and social systems. Often adopting a community development perspective, my past research has focussed on understanding how impacted groups have been affected by a change in, or introduction of, policies, programs or projects. I have work experience in urban development, digital agtech and natural resource management sectors with a particular focus on the resilience of marginalised groups.

  • Understanding the epistemological divides of knowledge systems in sustainability transitions
Gorkem Sezgin

Gorkem Sezgin is a healthcare researcher with extensive experience in applying innovative and advanced techniques to extract knowledge out of big data in areas of healthcare systems and delivery. Past research experience includes linking components of large healthcare datasets from hospitals and general practices, with a proven record of publications of the outcomes from linked datasets. Further skills involve developing statistical modelling techniques to describe outcomes.

  • Linking Hospital Emergency and Inpatient Admissions for secondary data analysis: a case study using Natural Language Processing
Hoai Anh Nguyen Dang

Hoai Anh Nguyen Dang

Hoai Anh is a PhD student at Western Sydney University, School of Business. Her research focuses on corporate social responsibility, green innovation and management. In these studies, she applies qualitative research approach (including observation and in-depth interviews) to deeply understand more about the phenomenon and process. She works at International School of Business, University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

  • Guidelines to a Ten-step Process for Concept Card Interviewing
Huda Shakil Ahmad Syyed

Huda Syyed has worked in academia and the non-profit sector and hopes to actively contribute to research and development efforts in the future. Her current topic of research focuses on the practice of ‘Female Genital Cutting’ and explores the lack of data, political activism and understanding regarding it in Pakistan. Her main academic interests include gender, sexuality and political culture. She is currently a PhD student and at Charles Darwin University. She completed her undergraduate degree from University of Karachi and went onto to pursue a Master’s taught format degree in International Relations at QueenMary University of London. In between, she completed a certificate course at The Graduate Institute Geneva. In the past, she has worked as a Research Assistant for academic projects and was also a Project Coordinator for a non-profit organisation, endorsed by ‘UN Women’ to deal with Gender-Based-Violence cases. She was also visiting faculty lecturer at Bahria University and taught the course of “International Organisations”, and temporarily worked as an editor at newspaper publications.

  • Using Qualitative Interviews to Find Data or Answers in Cultural Communities?
Jack Barton

Jack Barton is a statistician working at the Social Research Centre. Sampling and survey weighting are the main tasks Jack performs in his role as a statistician. Jack is currently undertaking a Master of Statistics and Operations Research at RMIT.

  • Balancing Longitudinal and Cross-Sectional Considerations for Probability Online Panels
Jennifer Renda
  • Reaching the hard-to-reach: recruiting and retaining underrepresented sub-groups in longitudinal research.
  • Altruistic incentives: why participants want more than dollars and cents
Jessica Mesman
  • Enabling care in healthcare improvement through video-reflexive ethnography
Jessie Dunstan

This paper is a collaboration between the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) who manage Ten to Men (TTM): the Australian Longitudinal Study of Male Health, and the Social Research Centre, our fieldwork partner for Ten to Men.

Jennifer Renda is the Senior Manager of Survey Methodology for both Ten to Men, and the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) at AIFS. Jenny brings over 20 years of research experience to her role, with particular expertise in fieldwork management, survey content and methodology development, and longitudinal studies.

Nikki Honey is an Executive Director at The Social Research Centre with extensive experience across a number of different methodologies including the management and implementation of telephone and online surveys, within both longitudinal, tracking and customised research projects.

Jessie Dunstan is the Manager of Survey Methodology for Ten to Men at AIFS, with over 15 years experience in social research. She has played a key role in the design, implementation, and statistical analyses of several large-scale national longitudinal and cross-sectional studies.

  • Reaching the hard-to-reach: recruiting and retaining underrepresented sub-groups in longitudinal research.
Joanne Hilder
  • Enabling care in healthcare improvement through video-reflexive ethnography
Joseph Daffy

Joseph Daffy is Data Science Team Leader at the Social Research Centre. Joseph specialises in R-Shiny, TWINS address cleaning software, automation and finding resourceful and efficient coding solutions. Joseph leads sample processing and production for A-BS projects across the business – a key component of this role is refinement of existing methods and approaches to maximise the value of this sampling frame.
Joseph has a Bachelor of Commerce (Actuarial Studies) and Graduate Diploma of Science (Statistics), both at the University of Melbourne.

  • Address-based sampling using the Geo-coded National Address File
Kateryna Kasianenko
  • A Simpler Approach to Interactive Topic Modeling
Katherine Boydell
  • Making together: A methodology in the making
Kathryn Kochan

Kathryn is an early-career researcher at the Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining (CSRM). She holds a Master of Development Practice from the University of Queensland where she undertook critical examination of the social, economic, and political relations existing within community and international development. She has an undergraduate background in Economics from a California State University. In 2021, Kathryn commenced a PhD (full time) with CSRM under an ARC Linkage grant to explore privately-commissioned public inquiry processes in large-scale mining projects. Kathryn concurrently works as a research assistant to the CSRM Director.

  • Public Displays of Attention: Exploring a Rare Form of Community Grievance Handling in the Global Mining Sector
Kipling Walker

Kipling is a Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Family Studies. He supports the Survey Methodology team in designing survey content and delivery for Ten to Men: The Australian Longitudinal Study on Male Health.

Kipling has experience in designing content and materials for national surveys, including conducting cognitive interviews with participants across Australia. His areas of interest include survey mode effects, digital usability and accessibility, and designing inclusive questions to properly reflect diverse populations.

  • There’s methodology in our madness: creating efficiency and opportunity by taking four diverse sub-cohorts to field
Leigh Tesch

Leigh Tesch is a current PhD candidate with University of Tasmania, School of Creative Arts and Media. Her research investigates storytelling with people with chronic kidney disease who are receiving haemodialysis. She has a background in occupational therapy, community and performing arts, and co-ordinating and delivering arts-and-health projects.

  • stILL-Life: a research process using story and performance to investigate living with kidney disease and receiving haemodialysis.
Len Coote

I have an academic appointment at one of Australia’s top business schools. My teaching is focused on the emerging field of business analytics and I am passionate about improving the data and statistical literacy of the next generation of business school graduates. My research interests include quantitative marketing and economics. Together with my academic collaborators, I developed a very general and flexible econometric model for studying decision-making and choice.

  • Choice Modelling in the Social and Behavioural Sciences
Lenneke Broeze

Lenneke is a Senior Research Consultant at the Social Research Centre. She has worked in market and social research since 2015 and has since worked on a range of research topics, including population health, social marketing, education and training, customer satisfaction and employee engagement. Aside from working on numerous online, CATI and mixed-mode research projects, Lenneke has also conducted face-to-face and telephone in-depth interviews, observational research and computer experiments.

She currently looks after the day-to-day management of the data collection processes for Ten to Men: the Australian Longitudinal Study on Male Health and will be presenting about the latest wave of this study at the conference.

  • There’s methodology in our madness: creating efficiency and opportunity by taking four diverse sub-cohorts to field
Lionel Pengilley

Lionel Pengilley is a PhD candidate at UniSA who is completing his thesis on the dynamics of firm composition in troubled regions. He has an interest in qualitative comparative analysis and its potential to address questions in economic geography.

  • Time for QCA in Regional Development
Luigina Mortari

Luigina Mortari is Full Professor of Philosophy of Education and Epistemology of Qualitative Research, at the Department of Human Sciences and the School of Medicine and Surgery. Her research concerns the Philosophy of care, the Philosophy of Education, the theoretical definition and implementation of qualitative research processes, and the training of teachers and health professionals. Among her latest publications: "The Philosophy of Care" (Springer VS, 2022) and "The Practice of Self-Care" (Cambridge Scholars, 2022).

  • The Educative Research in School: Design, Ethics and Method
Mahtut Yaynu and Susannah Breaden

Australian Bureau of Statistics - Data Collection Design Centre

  • Reforming business engagement: Using Human-Centred Design to reshape data provider correspondence
Markus Hahn

Markus Hahn is a research fellow at the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods. His research interests include survey methodology, the analysis of economic inequality and various aspects of labour economics. Prior to joining the ANU, Markus worked as an economist and survey statistician for the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey.

  • Findings from the first two waves of a small Australian online panel
Mary Wyer
  • Enabling care in healthcare improvement through video-reflexive ethnography
May Alrudayni

A PhD student doing my research in inclusive education.

  • A critical qualitative study of inclusive education in Saudi Arabia.
Michael Gionfriddo
  • Enabling care in healthcare improvement through video-reflexive ethnography
Mohd Zahid Juri

Zahid (Zed) Juri is a PhD researcher from the School of Teacher Education and Leadership (STEL) at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) with an academic background in Psychology. His PhD project is on the learning experiences of international students with remote learning and the value of online activity as prompt in understanding their day-to-day experiences.

  • Capitalising on online activity during interview: International student experience with remote learning
Natalia Boven

Natalia Boven is in the final stages of completing her PhD through COMPASS Research Centre and the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland. Her PhD research examines different approaches to constructing family socioeconomic measures using the Integrated Data Infrastructure. She is interested in the connections between measurement, inequities, and public policy.

  • Comparing approaches to specifying family SEP to model child outcomes in Aotearoa New Zealand
Nicholas Corbett

At ANU, I am studying the intersection of platform affordances and online extremism. My research argues that the two are producing qualitatively distinct phenomena from what informs the theories that underpin online extremism. Relevantly, I am also arguing that these phenomena require specific methodological approaches that privilege the details of the platform's infrastructure over conventional expectations about the phenomenon.

Generally speaking, I am interested in extremism of all types, platforms and the role of technology in contemporary life. My research is also informed by a significant interest in grand social theories, particularly those of Ulrich Beck and Manuel Castells.

  • Observing the alt-right on Reddit: constructing unique units of observation and analysis from platform activity
Patrick Rehill

Patrick Rehill is a PhD Candidate and Research Officer at the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods. His research looks at applying machine learning methods to policy evaluation. His professional background is as a quantitative researcher in public policy and the not-for-profit sector. He holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) and Master of Public Policy and Management both from the University of Melbourne.

  • Combining qualitative data and causal machine learning for better estimation
Pixie Willo

Pixie Willo is a writer, reviewer, voice actor, and performance poet from the Blue
Mountains, Australia.
Much of her work is written for performance. Pixie was a finalist in the 2013 Australian National Poetry slam. Her work has also been featured in The New Plains Review, Sinister Wisdom, Blue Poets, and
Bauhaus magazine. She holds a BA in Theatre, Performance, and Creative Writing from the University of New England, a Graduate Certificate in Creative Therapies from Charles Darwin University and is currently studying a Masters in Creative Therapies (Dramatherapy) at the University of Melbourne.
Her debut poetry book 'in Clarity's absence' was released in April 2021 and
published by Girls on Key Press.
There are many tones, shapes, and voices that flow through her words, each
marking a significant space in time.
Her work is deeply personal and autobiographical,
when Clarity leaves, words pour through the gaping cracks in search of truth...

  • Using poetic inquiry to give voice to women who had a traumatic birth through bearing witness
Priya Vaughan

Dr Priya Vaughan is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Black Dog Institute and the SPHERE KT Strategic Platform. With a research background in social anthropology and art history, Priya takes an interdisciplinary approach to health research, utilising arts-based, collaborative and socially informed methodologies. Priya is currently working on an ARC funded project which uses body mapping to learn from women with disability, experience of mental distress, or refugee background about their experiences of, and ways of coping with, stigma and discrimination.

  • Making together: A methodology in the making
Professor Aunty Kerrie Doyle

Professor Aunty Kerrie Doyle is the Associate Dean, Indigenous Health in Western Sydney University’s School of Medicine. A Winninninni/Cadigal/Irish woman, Professor Doyle was one of the first Indigenous women to graduate from Oxford University. She is also the Chair and Research Lead of the Aboriginal Health and Wellbeing Clinical Academic Group at Maridulu Budyari Gumal, the Sydney Partnership for Health, Education, Research and Enterprise (SPHERE); member of the Council of Elders for the Congress of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nurses and Midwives (CATSINaM); and board member for Ngaramura Aboriginal, Maori and Pacific Islander Corporation. Professor Doyle has spent her career dedicated to improving outcomes for Australia’s Indigenous population. Her research interests include: education, promoting applied cultural proficiency research, social determinants of health and Indigenous health. She has published extensively in academic journals, presented papers at national and international conferences and co-authored book chapters on Indigenous issues. Professor Doyle’s extensive research and teaching experience has made her a sought-after speaker at conferences and she is a well-known media spokesperson on Indigenous issues.

  • Researching in Indigenous Communities: an applied indigenist model
Professor Celia Roberts

Dr Celia Roberts is a Professor in the School of Sociology, ANU. She works in Feminist Technoscience Studies and the social studies of reproduction. Her books include Messengers of Sex: Hormones, biomedicine and feminism (Cambridge UP, 2007). Puberty in Crisis: The sociology of early sexual development (Cambridge UP, 2015), and, with Adrian Mackenzie and Maggie Mort, Living Data: Making sense of health biosensing (Bristol UP, 2018). She has recently completed a co-authored book on reproduction and climate crisis, focusing on the 2019-20 Australian bushfires, and is currently working on a new ARC-funded, interdisciplinary and collaborative project, led by bioethicist, Professor Catherine Mills, (Monash) on the translation of epigenetic into antenatal care in Australia. Celia did her PhD in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Sydney, and worked in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University for 18 years before returning to Australia. She has long-standing interests in feminist and social studies of the biology of sex, pre- and post-natal development and the enduring effects of early life trauma.

  • What is the social? Learning from feminist theories of embodiment and Science and Technology Studies
  • Panel discussion and Q&A – What is the future of biosocial research?
Professor David Burgner

Dr David Burgner is a Professor and paediatric infectious diseases clinician scientist. He completed his PhD on susceptibility to severe malaria at Oxford University in the UK and subsequently trained at Great Ormond Street Hospital and St Mary's Hospital/Imperial College, London. He was the first and only infectious diseases paediatrician in Western Australia from 2002 until 2010, when he relocated to Melbourne to join the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute. He is currently a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Senior Research Fellow, an honorary (NHFA) Future Leader Fellow, a Professorial Fellow at Melbourne University, and a paediatric infectious diseases consultant at Monash Children's Hospital.

  • Panel discussion and Q&A – What is the future of biosocial research?
  • Inflammation is the answer. What was the question again?
Professor David Silverman

Prof David Silverman is an outstanding scholar specialising in qualitative research. David is Professor Emeritus in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths College and Visiting Professor in the Management Department at King's College, University of London and the Business School, University of Technology, Sydney. He has authored 15 books and 45 journal articles on qualitative research, ethnography and conversation analysis. He is the author of four bestselling Sage textbooks on qualitative research and has published monographs on his research on a large public sector organization, medical consultations and HIV-test counselling. Prof Silverman has hosted workshops on qualitative research for PhD students in Australia since 2009 as well as in Europe, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Tanzania. He successfully supervised 30 PhD students, three of whom are now full Professors.

  • Qualitative Research for Social Impact
Professor Melissa Wake

Dr Melissa Wake is a paediatrician, community child health researcher, and Scientific Director of the Generation Victoria (GenV) initiative. Her "population paediatrics" agenda spans common childhood conditions and antecedents of diseases of ageing. Her goals are to speed up children's research and to test interventions that change children's care. Having led numerous community-based randomised trials, her major focus for this triennium is building the Generation Victoria (GenV) and Child Health CheckPoint platforms for generations of researchers. She has success in research translation including securing the Victorian Infant Hearing Screening Program, which now screens 80,000 babies annually and is springboarding a continuing program of population-based hearing research. She holds honorary Professorial positions with the Universities of Melbourne and Auckland.

  • Panel discussion and Q&A – What is the future of biosocial research?
Professor Naomi Priest

Dr Naomi Priest is a Professor and Group Leader of Social-Biological Research at the Centre for Social Research and Methods, Australian National University, co-located at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute. She is a lifecourse and social epidemiologist and has extensive experience in qualitative, mixed methods, and large-scale quantitative analysis, as well as in the conduct of collaborative research and policy and practice implementation related to child and adolescent health and health inequalities. Her research program is focused on examining how social forces and social exposures become biologically embedded and embodied, and on understanding and addressing inequalities in health and development, throughout the life course. Much of this work focuses on social determinants of health and health inequalities in mental health and cardiovascular disease for Aboriginal and ethnic minoritised children and adolescents.

  • Positive and adverse childhood experiences and inequalities in childhood inflammation and BMI – Building evidence for action
  • Panel discussion and Q&A – What is the future of biosocial research?
Professor Richard Saffery

Dr Richard Saffery is a Professor and molecular and cellular biologist and Principle Research Fellow at MCRI. He is also Deputy Director (Biosciences) for the Generation Victoria (GenV) initiative. His 'Early Origins of Chronic Disease' agenda spans pregnancy to adolescence and includes conditions such as childhood allergy, obesity and predictors of adult cardiovascular health and diabetes. Dr Saffery has over 250 publications in the field of early life programming and epigenetics. This includes novel discoveries on the factors that regulate the early life human epigenome and the role epigenetics in childhood allergy and immune development. His team have an overarching goal to understand how the modern environment interacts with underlying genetic variation to impact health, particularly in early life. Having led numerous longitudinal pregnancy cohorts in Australia, the EU and more recently China, Dr Saffery has a strong interest in understanding why young Aboriginal populations appear overrepresented in diabetes and chronic kidney disease, particularly via parental transmission of risk across generations.

  • Epigenetics: biological embedding of early life environmental exposures
  • Panel discussion and Q&A – What is the future of biosocial research?
Professor Tarani Chandola

Dr 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.

  • Drowning in data but what are the Insights for the social sciences?
  • Panel discussion and Q&A – What is the future of biosocial research?
Rebecca Paxton

Rebecca is a PhD student at the University of Adelaide where she is a member of the Food Values Research Group.

  • Revisiting the methodological advantages and limitations of asynchronous online focus groups for qualitative research
Robert James Ackland

Robert Ackland is a Professor in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University (ANU), specialising in social network analysis, computational social science and the social science of the Internet. Robert leads the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (VOSON) lab (http://vosonlab.net) which develops open source software for the collection and analysis of network and text data from social media and the WWW. Robert’s book Web Social Science was published by Sage in 2013, and he teaches courses on online research methods and the digital economy and society.

  • Characterising Political Discussion Networks on Twitter
Rosi Bombieri

Rosi Bombieri PhD is temporary assistant professor in Didactics and Special Pedagogy at the Department of Human Sciences of the University of Verona. She is a member of CRED (Research center on education and didactics, University of Verona) and Melete center (Center of Philosophy for Care, Scientific Head prof. L. Mortari). Her research areas concern the emotional and relational dimension in care and teaching contexts, Social and Emotional Learning and its implications for teacher training, ethics and citizenship education. She is involved in the MelArete project at the University of Verona, an educational and research project on the ethics of virtues in kindergartens, primary and secondary schools.

  • The Educative Research in School: Design, Ethics and Method
Sam Hames

Sam Hames is a post-doctoral research fellow in computational humanities. He has a PhD in applications of machine learning to medical imaging and an extensive background as a professional software developer. He is now focused on building a program of research focusing on how computational approaches can enable qualitative inquiry.

  • A Simpler Approach to Interactive Topic Modeling
Sebastian Kocar

Dr Sebastian Kocar is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Social Change in the College of Arts, Law and Education at the University of Tasmania. He specialises in survey methodology and statistics, with particular focus on web surveys and online panels. Sebastian’s research is primarily focused on investigating survey errors, including nonresponse, coverage, and measurement errors, in web surveys, online panels and mixed-mode surveys. The main objective of his methodological research is to find ways to improve the quality of data collected with various survey data collection approaches. His expertise is applied to survey research projects in different areas, such as higher education research and wellbeing.

  • Nonprobability recruitment methods for a place-based academic online panel
Shane Compton

Shane Compton is Director of the Quantitative Research Team at the Social Research Centre. He is an applied social policy researcher with 19 years of consulting experience in Australian Government and research agency positions. His areas of research interest include survey and methodological design including data quality frameworks and the Total Survey Error paradigm.
Shane has a Bachelor of Science (double major Psychology) degree from the Australian National University, Master of Applied Science (Organisational Psychology) from the University of Canberra and Diploma of Management from the University of Melbourne. Shane is also a member of the Research Society with Qualified Professional Researcher (QPR) accreditation.

  • Address-based sampling using the Geo-coded National Address File
Shaun Ratcliff

Dr Shaun Ratcliff
Director, Data Science - Public Affairs and Polling, YouGov

Shaun is responsible for complex, often high profile projects for clients engaged in political activities and related work across the Asia-Pacific region, and other specialty custom research.

His work is largely focused on understanding how the public thinks about issues, organisations and events, and what influences their beliefs and actions. He helps national political campaigns, NGOs, trade unions and corporate clients collect the data they need to make well-informed decisions.

Shaun also regularly engages in public discussions on voter attitudes and behaviours. His research has appeared in a range of academic publications, and he has authored articles on and been interviewed about these topics for international and Australian media outlets.

He has a PhD in Political Science from Monash University, and he has taught data science and survey research for ACSPRI, the University of Sydney, Monash University and the University of Melbourne.

  • Successes and lessons from polling at the 2022 federal election
Sophie Coulon

Sophie Coulon is a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland. She is currently doing her PhD with Associate Professor Courtney von Hippel on an Australian Research Council Discovery grant examining wellbeing and engagement at work among older employees. Sophie’s interests are in the area of social and organisational psychology, specifically looking at how negative age-based stereotypes affect older employees at work.

  • Engaging and Retaining the Aging Workforce: A Multi-level Approach to Predicting Age-based Stereotype Threat
Sudarat Srirak

Sudarat Srirak is an academic teaching English at the Prince of Songkla University, Thailand. She is currently undertaking a PhD research program at the School of Education, RMIT University. Her research focuses on Thailand's higher education curriculum development.

  • How do English language teachers incorporate critical thinking as a strategy to drive learning outcomes?
Suyin Hor
  • Enabling care in healthcare improvement through video-reflexive ethnography