School of Social Sciences and Public Policy

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https://hdl.handle.net/10292/2105
There is a wide range of research activity in AUT's School of Social Sciences and Public Policy. The school has an active research community, with staff and postgraduate research in areas such as psychology, sociology and public policy.

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Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 5 of 92
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    Vaccination Uptake, Happiness and Emotions: Using a Supervised Machine Learning Approach
    (Global Labor Organization (GLO), 2024-09-06) Rossouw, Stephanie; Greyling, Talita
    The COVID-19 pandemic is an example of an immense global failure to curb the spread of a pathogen and save lives. To indirectly protect people against a deadly virus, a population needs to achieve herd immunity, which is attained either through vaccination or prior infection. However, achieving herd immunity by vaccination is preferable as it limits the health risks of disease. As the coronavirus mutated, vaccination estimates for achieving herd immunity went from 70% to 90%. In this study, we investigate the order of the importance of the variables to identify those factors that contribute most to achieving high vaccination rates. Secondly, we consider if subjective measures, including the level of happiness and different collective emotions of populations, contribute to higher vaccine uptake. We employ an XGBoost machine learning model (and, as robustness tests, Random Forest and Decision Tree models) to train our data. Our target output variable is the number of people vaccinated as a percentage of the population. We consider two thresholds of our output variable, the first at 70% of a country's population, corresponding to the initial suggestions to achieve herd immunity, and the second with a threshold of 90%, suggested later due to the highly infectious virus. We use a dataset that includes ten countries in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere and variables related to COVID-19, vaccines, country characteristics and the level of happiness and collective emotions within countries. The most important variables listed in reaching the 70% and 90% thresholds are similar. These include the implemented vaccination policy, international travel controls, the percentage of the population in rural areas, the average temperature, and the happiness levels within countries. It is remarkable how the importance of subjective measures of people's emotions and moods play a role in attaining higher vaccination levels. As the vaccine threshold increases, the importance of subjective well-being variables rises. Therefore, not only the implemented policies and country characteristics but also the happiness levels and emotions play a role in compliance and achieving higher vaccination thresholds. Our results provide actionable policy insights to increase vaccination rates. Additionally, we highlight the importance of subjective measures such as happiness and collective emotions to increase vaccination rates and assist governments to be better prepared for the next global pandemic.
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    A Necromantic Hauntology of the Void in the Canary Islands: In/Re-Surrection
    (Addleton Academic Publishers, 2024)
    My wrestling with (not) belonging, which started almost a decade ago with my arrival to Aotearoa/New Zealand, was prevalent during my re-turn (Barad, 2014) to my birthplace, the Canary Islands, seeking to revive my connections to the land, its histories and its/my Indigeneity. My engagement with te ao Māori (‘the Māori world’) was essential to (re)connect with the whenua (‘land’) in a way I had never done before, as an ancestor, cradling (non-)descendants of the Indigenous Canarians (see Ramirez & Pasley, 2022; Ramirez, 2024). The im/possibilities of the in/determinacy of Canarian Indigeneity’s nothingness/openness (Barad, 2012) require an engagement with our Indigenous Canarian inheritance beyond Western thinking. While questions that emerged during my re-turn produced more questions, my travels also offered strategies to move forward. Developing a Canarian onto-epistemology is imperative not only to decolonise the Canary Islands but also to save what is left (cultural and (hi)storical preservation) and save the whenua (from unstainable tourism). This begins with initiating necromantic hauntological practices of the void to ‘heal’ wounds left in the Canary Islands by colonisation and subsequent colonialities. The pasados que (nunca) fueron y futuros que (nunca) pueden ser (‘pasts that were (not), futures that can (never) be’) that materialise in the current culture, language, peoples and institutions (legal and educational), revive and reconfigure my relationship to the land, its histories and its/my Indigeneity. A process of in/re-surrection started. It is now that I am un/becoming Indigenous.
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    What It Means to Belong in the Global South: A Coda to Two Special Issues on ‘Wrestling with (Not) Belonging’
    (Addleton Academic Publishers, 2024) Pasley, Ampersand; Ramirez, Elba; Sturm. Sean
    Belonging, as this special issue demonstrates, is no simple matter. Indeed, the complexity of the topic demanded a double issue to make space for the many and varied ways in which (not) belonging can make itself felt. Notably, the (not) of (not) belonging in this collection transcends the rationalist reduction of ontology to negative difference, whereby we know what something is through its relation to what it is not. Many contributions acknowledge the injustice of colonial concepts of belonging. While injustice can neither be erased nor resolved once and for all, the works in this double issue demonstrate how attending to these spectres of coloniality offers the possibility of different – and possibly more just – worlds. Several other contributions also explore strategies for knowing and being differently. Some strategies for tending to the wounds of injustice involved more practical enactments. What we sensed when we reread the contributions to write this coda was that the contributions – although differentiated by the contributors’ experiences as people(s) and those of their peoples – had something in common. We saw that they expressed a sense that (not) belonging could be traced in relations of difference, of becoming-with and becoming-otherwise.
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    Scaling Climate Finance: Forest Finance Instruments
    (Climate Innovation Lab, 2020-02-26) Hall, D; Lindsay, S
    The Lab’s inaugural concept paper, Scaling Climate Finance: Forest Finance Instruments, proposes seven innovative instruments, each ranked in respect to impact strategy and additionality. The paper analyses an environmental impact bond, a leveraged carbon fund, a green covered bond, an equity fund designed to upscale continuous cover forestry, risk-adjusted loans, and an exchange for investing in Nature-Based Solutions. Each concept was developed by reviewing international innovations, adapting promising structures to the unique local context of Aotearoa New Zealand, and conducting workshops and reviews with sector experts and government observers to test, refine and validate the structure. The paper also identifies relevant indicators for impact assessment, such as IRIS metrics, and potential regulatory changes to support the delivery of more sustainable forest outcomes.
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    Trust Predicts Compliance With COVID-19 Containment Policies: Evidence from Ten Countries Using Big Data
    (Elsevier, 2024-07-20) Sarracino, Francesco; Greyling, Talita; O'Connor, Kelsey; Peroni, Chiara; Rossouw, Stephanie
    We use Twitter, Google mobility, and Oxford policy data to study the relationship between trust and compliance over the period March 2020 to January 2021 in ten, mostly European, countries. Trust has been shown to be an important correlate of compliance with COVID-19 containment policies. However, the previous findings depend upon two assumptions: first, that compliance is time invariant, and second, that compliance can be measured using self reports or mobility measures alone. We relax these assumptions by calculating a new time-varying measure of compliance as the association between containment policies and people's mobility behavior. Additionally, we develop measures of trust in others and national institutions by applying emotion analysis to Twitter data. Results from various panel estimation techniques demonstrate that compliance changes over time and that increasing (decreasing) trust in others predicts increasing (decreasing) compliance. This evidence indicates that compliance changes over time, and further confirms the importance of cultivating trust in others.
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