Webinar: Making better use of existing administrative data

Disclaimer: ANROWS webinars bring together a diverse range of speakers on a particular topic, informed by the evidence base, lived expertise, and policy and practice knowledge. The views expressed by speakers or other third parties in ANROWS webinars and any subsequent materials are those of the speaker or third party and not, necessarily, of ANROWS.

Making better use of existing administrative data is a priority of The Australian National Research Agenda to End Violence against Women and Children (ANRA) 2023–2028.  

This webinar was the first in a series designed to support the implementation of the ANRA, and will explore the six ways of working and ways of knowing:

1. Making better use of existing administrative data
2. Creating space for pilots and evaluations of community-led interventions
3. Indigenous methodologies
4. Valuing practitioners’ expertise
5. Listening to children when they are children
6. Working with the knowledge of experts by experience

The event focused on the research priority set out in the agenda: to make better use of existing administrative data.

A panel of experts explored:

• what we mean when we talk about existing data
• the landscape of domestic, family and sexual violence (DFSV) data in Australia
• accessing and working with existing datasets
• the challenges and opportunities to work with existing datasets
• data custodian and researcher partnerships
• data sovereignty
• principles to guide working with existing data.

This webinar will be of interest to anyone wanting to understand the possibilities of working with existing datasets, and for all people working in, and adjacent to, research on domestic, family and sexual violence, including data custodians, policymakers, peak bodies, researchers and funders, to ethically make better use of existing data.

Enquiries: [email protected]

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Speakers

Panel facilitator

Sally Mills

Sally Mills is responsible for the Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence Unit in the Community Services Group at the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. This unit plays a lead role in reporting on family, domestic and sexual violence in Australia. Through this work the unit also identifies related data gaps and/or quality issues and undertakes priority data development. In 2023, the unit released a new website dedicated to family, domestic and sexual violence that will be regularly updated to provide the latest statistics and information. The unit is also working with jurisdictions and the sector to develop a prototype data collection on specialist crisis family and domestic violence services provided to victims and survivors.

Panellists

Professor Maggie Walter

Professor Maggie Walter is a Palawa woman from Lutruwita, Tasmania. She is a founding member of the Maiam nayri Wingara Indigenous Data Sovereignty Collective and the Global Indigenous Data Alliance. She is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and was the inaugural Pro Vice-Chancellor of Aboriginal Research and Leadership at the University of Tasmania. She is also a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Professor Walter’s research centres on challenging, empirically and theoretically, standard explanations for Indigenous inequality including how Indigenous data are understood and utilised.

Dr Betty Luu

Betty has a PhD in Developmental Psychology and skills in mixed methods approaches. With a strong interest in understanding how the early environment can best support children’s development, her research program involves the analysis of child welfare administrative data to provide insights and drive change in practice and policy, ensuring effective implementation of practices to support children and families and amplifying the voices of children, young people and families. She is also currently supervising two PhD students utilising the NSW Human Services Data Set (HSDS) on projects in the areas of youth justice and early parenthood among care-experienced youth.

Dr Rebecca Buys

Dr Rebecca Buys is the Head of Policy and Research at No to Violence. She has extensive experience working in policy, research and communications roles within governments, NGOs and research institutes in Australia, the United Kingdom and Aotearoa/New Zealand to help address social inequities and advocate for change on family violence, forced migration, intra and interstate conflict, poverty and trade injustice. Her research focuses on developing more complex understandings of forms of violence and practices of care and she advances inclusive, ethical, relational research methodologies.

Vivian Yue

Vivian Yue is currently a Manager in the Human Services Dataset Governance and Privacy team in the Family and Communities Insights, Analysis and Research Directorate for the NSW Department of Communities and Justice. Vivian has worked across a number of public sector agencies with a focus on privacy, data and information access. In her current role, Vivian is responsible for ensuring use of the Human Services Dataset (HSDS) is aligned with NSW legislation.