The benefits of government administrative data are well-established, but research has not examined processes by which these data can be identified, organised and governed in line with ethical considerations. This is an important undertaking given the potential benefits of robust administrative data, especially at a time when the collection of…

The COVID 19 pandemic illuminates the role data has in public policy-making, i.e. datafication of society, and the importance of exploring the local sources of data to reveal errors in what has assuredly been from the beginning an undercount of cases and deaths. I note four interrelated error sources. The first two are common to any quantitative…

In online surveys, the use of manipulation checks aimed at measuring respondents' attentiveness has become common. More than being measures of attentiveness pertaining to a specific survey, instructional manipulation checks (IMC) could work as generic measures of the quality of the answers a person gives when completing a questionnaire. By using…

Studies of human spatial behavior increasingly rely on a combination of audiovisual and geospatial recordings. So far, however, few analytical environments have offered opportunities for integrated and expedient annotation and analysis of the two. Here we report the first study aimed at integrating geospatial data in an environment developed for…

This article describes and justifies a reporting standard to improve data use documentation in Agent-Based Modelling. Following the development of reporting standards for models themselves, empirical modelling has now developed to the point where these standards need to take equally effective account of data use (which previously has tended to be…

Participation in web surveys via smartphones increased continuously in recent years. The reasons for this increase are a growing proportion of smartphone owners and an increase in mobile Internet access. However, research has shown that smartphone respondents are frequently distracted and/or multitasking, which might affect completion and response…

In recent years, the Australian government has encouraged open access to administrative data, providing new opportunities for examining life course pathways and evaluating social policies. This paper demonstrates the importance of establishing partnerships in the use of administrative data for social research. In collaboration with the data…