Social Data Analytics (SoDA) Lab

We are partnered with Family Life, Alfred Health, Australian Childhood Foundation and the Royal Women’s Hospital to drive the development of the Children and Parent Centre of Excellence (CAPCE), serving vulnerable children and families in the Bayside Peninsula region. CAPCE is a pilot program designed to demonstrate how a place-based, connected, infant-focused, expert early intervention service can simultaneously generate improved outcomes for vulnerable infants exposed to trauma and their families. It may also provide cost savings to the government.  

We’re actively working with CAPCE partners to identify and map available data that can be provided to support data-driven service delivery of this pilot and associated knowledge building. One of the key outcomes of the work to date is a Responsible Data Sharing Framework, designed to enable sensitive data to be shared across CAPCE partner organisations.

The Global Digital Health Partnership (GDHP) is a collaboration of governments and territories, government agencies, and the World Health Organization (WHO). It was formed to support the effective implementation of digital health services. GDHP has identified several ‘benefits categories’ of digital health including:  

• digital health quality and efficacy 
• digital health end-user experience 
• population health trends and secondary uses 
• digital health efficiency and return on investment 
• digital health equity. 

In collaboration with the Australian Digital Health Agency, we’re undertaking a rapid review of the literature on benefits realisation categories and proximal measurements of digital health services. 

Aligning with the Victorian Government’s Ending Family Violence 10 Year Plan, we’re part of an exploratory study, ‘Social Outcomes of Policy — Helpful Intelligence and Analytics (SOPHIA)’, that seeks to understand family violence outcomes in Victoria using novel data analytical techniques. 

This work is also part of our Digital Inclusion research program. 

Mobile devices and social media platforms drive new forms of humanitarian action and voluntary service. This project involved transforming Instagram activity into data by classifying people’s vernacular expressions of humanitarian action and understanding the contexts, situations and targets of those actions.

This work was also part of our Digital Inclusion research program.

This project measured informal employee social networks before a restructure by the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet. We co-designed a plan for change and then measured the restructure impact via another network assessment. 

Social resilience is the capacity for groups and communities to preserve and sustain their wellbeing in the face of adverse challenges. We collaborated with the City of Glen Eira to integrate socio-economic, urban and social media data into a multifaceted social resilience model for various groups and communities. The outcome provided a blueprint for identifying community priorities and tailoring social services based on community needs. We also developed several data dashboards that provide comparisons of Glen Eira suburbs with other councils.