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The final session at the ACSPRI 2024 conference starts with Carly Gardner, whose focus is on the impact of form school uniform policies on physical activities in school kids. Physical activity is critically important in improving health and protecting against chronic diseases, but school uniforms are often very formal and restrict movement; some schools therefore allow kids to wear their sports uniforms at least one day per week, and there may be an argument to use these as everyday uniforms.

From a first survey, 62% of school students surveyed would support this approach, but further research is required to examine …

I’m the next speaker at the ACSPRI 2024 conference, presenting our new practice mapping method for this study of multimodal networks. Slides are below:

The final speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Sidiq Madya, whose interest is in the discussion of the idea of data sovereignty by civil society organisations. Data sovereignty is a spectrum of approaches by nation states to subject data flows to national jurisdictions, and/or the ability or right of individuals to control their personal data and information.

This addresses the misuse and abuse of personal data for surveillance or microtargeting, seeks to mitigate increasing datafication, and seeks alternative models of data governance that limit the free flow of data and encourage local data ownership. There are a large …

The next speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Nicholas Corbett, whose focus is on ties between the alt-right, Gamergate, and the MAGA movement on Reddit. This entanglement has taken place for the best part of the past ten years or so, but exactly how strong are the links between these groups, and how does this manifest on Reddit’s?

This project explores a network of some 51 relevant subreddits that share a certain amount of participants. The focus here is especially on the subreddit’s core constituency: those users who participate more in the specific subreddit than in any of …

The third speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Mingming Cheng, whose focus is on the use of multi-modal data in the analysis of modern slavery risks on social media. Modern slavery includes forced labour, forced marriage, human trafficking, debt bondage, and other related practices; it targets vulnerable individuals, and these might also be identified through social media (for instance through ads or recruitment posts that mimic ordinary advertising).

Such content can spread very rapidly, and identifying and regulating it is very difficult. It requires a multi-modal approach that analyses visual, audio, and text data, and the present project …

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 …