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The next session at the Weizenbaum Conference starts with Mona Krewel, whose interest is in (micro-)targeted advertising in elections; she explores this here especially in the context of the 2024 US presidential election. All parties use such advertising, and tend to target voters whom they assume are ideologically close to them; our understanding of how this works is limited, however, and based largely on self-reporting from campaign managers (which is not necessarily reliable).

A different approach to this is via the Meta Ad Targeting dataset, which is problematic for other reasons; the present project explored the targeting strategies of some …

I’m in Berlin this week for the annual conference of the excellent Weizenbaum-Institut, which opens with a keynote by the great Claes de Vreese, whose keynote asks whether citizens are ready for an AI democracy (it won’t surprise anyone that the short answer is No). Democracy and politics are rapidly transforming at the present moment; democracy is under threat from populist and far-right movements and various other actors, and there are widespread concerns about democratic backsliding around the world. In a reversal of trends in the 1990s and 200os, the number of true democracies in the world is shrinking …

The final speaker for this session, and the ACSPRI 2024 conference overall, is María Larrea, and her interest is in the learning journeys of airline cabin crews. María has worked as a flight attendant and crew trainer and manager herself, and questions the extent to which formal training actually prepares cabin crew for their work.

Such training is often in a formal setting in classrooms rather than simulated cabin environments; the airline industry is highly regulated, and cabin crew activities are highly influenced by psychological perspectives, but drawing on sociocultural perspectives that see learning as a situated experience in natural …

The next speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Kelly Edwards, whose focus is on healthcare provision: how do we measure what actually matters to patients? Surveying experiences rather than merely satisfaction is important here: qualitative, real-time surveys that were co-created with patients and are used to share feedback with nurses should be seen as the most desirable aim here, but are uncommon in everyday practice.

This is a call for participatory action research, then: a collaborative, iterative approach that is action-oriented. Such research is not easy, however, especially within standard ethics frameworks that require the research project to …

The next speaker in this final ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Kirstie Northfield, whose focus is on conducting interviews with adolescents through instant messaging services. This is in the service of a project on adolescent mobbing. Plenty of work has been done on quality of life assessments for adolescents through parents and teachers as proxy reporters, but these are not always accurate: in parallel reporting tests, mothers’ assessments appear to be most closely matched to adolescents’ actual experiences, while teachers’ reports have not been well tested by by parallel studies.

Who, then, is a reliable judge of adolescent wellbeing? How …

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: