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The second speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Eve Cheng, whose interest is in party structures in parliamentary networks – party structures here means personal and professional backgrounds, including military and civilian careers, party memberships, educational track records, etc.

The assumption here is that such backgrounds might determine party structures, predict electoral success, and affect policy-making. Key metrics here were average maximal flow (assessing the global network) and transitivity (focussing on local structures), and a comparison between these two networks is especially interesting.

In 1960s Australian Labor, for instance, there was one large trade unionist cluster, with one …

The second day at the ACSPRI 2024 conference dawns with a session on social network mapping, and starts with a paper by our wonderful conference chair Rob Ackland. This presents work on an international collaboration around technology and political communication, with a particular focus on social bots. This explores especially the potential for such bots to connect people with different ideas online, with the aim to improve public discourse.

This requires us, in the first place, to understand where discussion and deliberation are occurring in online spaces: deliberative conversations require both diversity (or representation of different ideas) and argumentation (a …

The final speaker in this mixed-methods session at the ACSPRI 2024 conference is Alexandra Gregory, whose work is on mixed-methods research with Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. In the first place, her work uses surveys with Indigenous populations in remote areas, but this has significant limitations: such populations are unlikely to be included in survey design, misalign with culturally appropriate communication styles, and require further qualitative elements and adaptation.

Remote communities in the Northern Territory are small communities with a mostly Indigenous population; one example of a survey with such communities surveyed local mothers about a nurse home-visitation programme …

The second speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Qian Eileen Yang, whose research used grounded theory. Grounded theory has evolved from its traditional models through an evolved version towards constructivist grounded theory as developed by Charmaz; while original formulations built only on the data gathered for the study, the latter puts the literature review first in order to enable the scoping of the research work against existing knowledge.

Grounded theory is an inductive approach that builds theory from the research, without preconceived hypotheses or theories; it is said to be suitable for both qualitative and quantitative, and indeed …

The next session at the ACSPRI 2024 conference is on mixed methods research, and starts with Sara Yaghmour, whose focus is on dementia care. Her focus is especially on Saudi Arabia, where – as in much of the developing world – there is still a lack of awareness, policy, and resources in this field, even though there is an unusual high level of dementia cases in Saudi Arabia.

Sara’s project explores nurses’ knowledge, attitudes, and perceptions of dementia; it combines a quantitative survey of nurses, a qualitative diary and interview study, and an interpretive process combining these components. This covered …

The final speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Aaron Willcox, presenting work with the Scanlon Research Institute to explore local government-level civic opportunities. For organisations, such opportunities include hosting events, offering memberships, involving individuals through volunteering, and taking action through advocacy and campaigns.

The project used the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission database, which contains valid information on the activities of some 30,000 charities around the country; it used Web scraping and human coding to identify civic activities, and utilised Large Language Models to directly code the data as well as to emulate the coding process of human …

The next speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference is Gia Bao Hoang, whose interest is in the use of LLMs for detecting efficient persuasion in online discourse. Such an understanding of effective persuasion could then be used for productive and prosocial purposes, or alternatively to identify problematic uses of persuasion by bad actors.

For this analysis, Bao is using data from the Change My View subreddit, where users clearly indicate whether the arguments made have actually changed their minds; and the Truth Wins dataset, which stems from human experiments and contains human-labelled data from persuasion and attention games. He used …

The next speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Sair Buckle, whose interest is in the use of Large Language Models to detect bullying language in organisational contexts. Bullying is of course a major societal problem, including in companies, and presents a psychosocial hazard: there are several proposed approaches to address it, including surveys and interviews and manual linguistic classification (e.g. in federal parliament), which are subjective and manually intensive; pulse surveys and self-labelling questionnaires (e.g. in companies), which are subjective and limited in their data access; and there are technology-first approaches using LLMs and machine learning to detect …

The first session at the ACSPRI 2024 conference is on generative AI, and starts with Lachlan Watson. He is interested in the use of AI assistance to analyse public policy submissions, here in the context of Animal Welfare Victoria’s draft cat management strategy. Feedback could be in the form of written submissions, surveys, or both, and needed to be analysed using quantitative approaches given the substantial volume of submission.

The organisation chose Relevance AI as a tool for this – this is a low code AI solution not unlike ChatGPT, but data is hosted in a private environment and none …

From the AANZCA conference in Melbourne of the last few days I’ve moved on to the ACSPRI 2024 conference in Sydney for the rest of the week, which starts with a keynote by Maggie Walter, on methodologies for Indigenous statistics and quantitative research. Maggie is a Palawa woman from Tasmania. Data and population statistics have changed dramatically over the past decade or more; conventionally, Australian Indigenous people have been presented merely as average statistics that show what Maggie calls the Statistical Indigene: documenting prolonged disadvantage and inequality.

This is the case because these are the things we have data about …