4. What do you believe will be the future priorities or emerging areas of interest for institutional research, in particular, since COVID-19?
I think a clear future priority will be measuring the wellbeing of organisational communities. COVID-19 has forced us to recognise simplistic approaches to health and wellbeing no longer help, and that we need a pluralistic approach to physical, mental, social, and spiritual matters. COVID-19 made me think hard about how to measure social and spiritual welfare.
A priority I would like to see emerge is more effort being directed to response bias studies. A better understanding through representativeness, wave analysis, and following up non-responders helps us work out what those error bars really mean.
5. Complete this statement: In my role, I can’t operate effectively without …
… a great community. This ranges from senior executives prioritising the role of data to the clients asking for help with data collections, to my team at ANU, to the teams at SRC, AAIR, and other universities who make it all happen, to the people who make the time to respond! (Well, people who provide valid and complete responses, especially to response bias studies …)