Interviews and Questionnaires as Mixed Methods in Population Geography: TheCase of Lone Fathers in Newcastle,Australia

A mixed method approach was adopted to study the experiences of lonefathers, using a classic triangulation approach of interview and questionnaire data. This study utilised an empirical realist framework of scientific enquiry, with the ‘soft’ individual interview data seen as an adjunct to the ‘hard’ aggregate quantitative methods. A review of this study found that the interviews worked well as a pilot study in a classic mixed methods framework. The questionnaires provided a range of information about thecharacteristics of this group of lone fathers, but it was the interviews which provided astonishing depth on the causes of marital breakdown and post-marital conflict, and on the discourses and other structures which sustain social processes. In this study, the interview techniques could have been used differently, in a different framework of analysis (that of critical rather than empirical realism) without the support of other mixed methods.     

Interviews and Questionnaires as Mixed Methods in Population Geography: TheCase of Lone Fathers in Newcastle,Australia

A mixed method approach was adopted to study the experiences of lonefathers, using a classic triangulation approach of interview and questionnaire data. This study utilised an empirical realist framework of scientific enquiry, with the ‘soft’ individual interview data seen as an adjunct to the ‘hard’ aggregate quantitative methods. A review of this study found that the interviews worked well as a pilot study in a classic mixed methods framework. The questionnaires provided a range of information about thecharacteristics of this group of lone fathers, but it was the interviews which provided astonishing depth on the causes of marital breakdown and post-marital conflict, and on the discourses and other structures which sustain social processes. In this study, the interview techniques could have been used differently, in a different framework of analysis (that of critical rather than empirical realism) without the support of other mixed methods.     

Contracts and member checks in qualitative research in human geography: reason for caution?

Contracts with, and member checks by, research participants are increasingly recommended in qualitative research in human geography. However, differences in qualitatively researching 'the powerful', as opposed to researching 'down' mean that contracts and member checks may need to be approached with caution regarding the former. The possibility of the censorship of critique by powerful research participants is exemplified in this article, and a number of more general dilemmas in qualitatively researching 'up' are also discussed. Finally, some choices which might help address possible difficulties in qualitatively researching the powerful are outlined.     

Geographies of energy transition: the case of high-performing commercial office space in the central business districts of Sydney and Melbourne,Australia

As a signatory to the Paris Climate Agreement, Australia committed to reduce emissions significantly by 2030. In a country highly urbanised and dependent on fossil fuels as its primary energy source, one key avenue for meeting these commitments is energy transition in the built environment. Australia has emerged as a leader in the design and construction of high-performance buildings in the premium commercial office sector. In this paper, we address a significant gap in understanding the diverse mechanisms through which building energy transition is being constituted in this sector, focusing on Sydney and Melbourne. In the absence of substantive publicly available data, we draw on mixed methods comprising a database developed around high-performing CBD office buildings and qualitative interviews with a range of sectoral stakeholders. We characterise the building stock in each city, and document five trends constituting energy transitions. We demonstrate that building energy transitions are not only shaped purposefully by dominant governance regimes but also by opportunistic responses to specific material and commercial conditions and legacies in each city. Thus the urban built environment affords significant opportunity for energy transitions, but pathways towards such transitions are necessarily multiple and ultimately shaped by material as well as institutional geographies.     

Thinking outside the framework: equitable research partnerships for environmental research in Australia

Many environmental science research programmes now adopt community-based philosophies and designs, although there are few applications in Australian Indigenous communities. This research describes the development and testing of a framework of engagement to guide collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians during an environmental sciences research project. That project aimed to assess trepang (sea cucumber) stocks in Aboriginal waters, and determine the commercial harvest potential of the resource to local people. Its objectives were to undertake trepang survey and mapping, integrate Indigenous knowledge about the resource, and model the existing catch data of commercial fishers operating in the region. The framework of engagement developed to guide the research process comprised a goal, research stages, and a number of guiding principles for collaboration, which were constructed from content analysis of available guidelines and literature and from data gathered during expert interviews. Further data were gathered using participant observation, while implementing the trepang research in accordance with this framework of engagement, and these data were analysed to test and evaluate the framework. Findings indicate discursive and reflective approaches such as action research or adaptive management may better facilitate equitable research partnerships for sustainable development.     

Subversive sites: rave culture, spatial politics and the internet in Sydney, Australia

Summary 'Rave' subcultures have emerged over the last ten years in Sydney, mobilizing spatial practices and dance styles that originated in Europe and North America. As these dance cultures diversify and fragment, the internet is increasingly being used as a means of organizing rave activities, publishing information about artists, DJs and record labels, and, in more radicalized fragments of the scene, is imbued with meaning—as a 'web' to support illegal appropriations of urban space for dance venues. Hakim Bey's 'Temporary Autonomous Zone', a left-anarchist spatial philosophy, underlies this rhetorical use of new computer technology, and is central to debates about youth subcultures, music and space, which I examine throughout this paper.     

Permits to burn: weeds,slow violence,and the extractive future of northern Australia

ABSTRACT

This essay narrates the ‘slow violence’, or creeping environmental harms taking place within contemporary environmental governance. It centres on a tall, dense and highly flammable introduced pasture species Gamba grass (Andropogon gayanus), which was listed as a weed across north Australian jurisdictions in 2008. Since this time, it has continued to expand its reach across the Northern Territory (NT). With a potential invasion range of over 380,000?sqkm², this grass is a serious threat to many more-than-human worlds in the north, including Indigenous-led and Indigenous-owned environmental service economies and multimillion-dollar projects engaged in savanna fire management for carbon credits. Drawing upon fieldwork and interviews with a range of public servants, landholders and researchers in the NT between 2015 and 2018, this essay demonstrates how environmental governance is being undermined through specific institutions and practices. Through an ethnographic reading of weed management documents, including several legal permits to grow Gamba grass within the NT’s ‘eradication zone’, this essay narrates the diverse threads of a pressing ‘slow’ disaster. The unfolding story of Gamba grass, we suggest, is instructive for those seeking to understand the present and future of resource extraction or ‘extractivism’ in Australia and elsewhere.     

The Decentred Firm and the Adoption of Sustainable Office Space in Sydney,Australia

As the social, ecological and economic benefits of green buildings become more established, firms, especially professional service firms, are responding by adopting sustainable office space (SOS). Accelerating this uptake demands a nuanced appreciation of firms’ understandings of and motivations for adopting SOS. Through a qualitative study of professional service firms in Sydney, this paper brings together a decentred understanding of the contemporary firm drawn from the ‘new economic geographies’ approach and theories of corporate social responsibility to trace and interpret the diverse and overlapping motivations shaping the uptake of SOS amongst these firms. The firm is shown to be a site of plurality and agency, governed by multiple logics. Whilst motivations informed by economic logic remain persuasive and pervasive, the adoption of SOS is simultaneously informed by a wider palette of logics, including environmental and social logics. The paper argues that a decentred conceptualisation of the firm brings the multiplicity of firms’ orientations towards SOS into view and, in so doing, has the potential to inform a politics of intervention for steering firms towards more socially and environmentally sustainable behaviours.     

Unemployment in Non-Metropolitan Australia: integrating geography,social and individual contexts

Despite a significant period of strong economic and jobs growth nationally, there is well-established evidence in Australia that the proceeds of this growth have not been shared equally, either between places or between individuals. Empirically, it is well known that particular socioeconomic groups have a higher risk of unemployment and it has become equally well established that there are particular geographic patterns of labour market disadvantage that suggest that local geographic context is also important. What is not well understood are the ways in which phenomena at the geographic level are associated with individual-level characteristics and other social contexts in ways that negatively impact on a range of social outcomes, including unemployment. The present paper specifically addresses this issue by using a multi-scalar approach and using survey data from the Housing, Income and Labour Force Dynamics Australia (HILDA) survey and aggregate level census data to model unemployment risk. The paper argues that to better understand unemployment and to add to sound policy development, approaches that incorporate a variety of contexts, including the impact of local geographies, are important.     

Rural transformation: Cherry growing on the Guanzhong Plain,China and the Adelaide Hills,South Australia

Journal of Geographical Sciences - This paper echoes a tradition in agricultural geography by focusing on a single crop: cherries. It illustrates how developments associated with globalisation and...     

Collaborating in the field, working for change: Reflecting on partnerships between academics, development organizations and rural communities in Africa

Academics and development organizations approach fieldwork with somewhat different motivations, constraints and challenges. In many instances, fieldwork might be improved if greater collaboration occurred between these two parties. Rural communities are also important yet frequently taken for granted partners in the research process that deserve greater respect. This paper explores and describes the real and imagined impediments to greater collaboration between academics, development organizations and rural communities. The findings are based on 18 years of working with rural communities in Africa, both as a development practitioner and academic researcher. This reflection makes three contributions to the broader literature on fieldwork. First, it explicitly links two ongoing discussions, one on relationships with institutional partners, the other on interactions with rural communities. Second, it articulates the concerns of development organizations in their partnerships with academic researchers, a perspective rarely heard in a literature dominated by academic voices. Third, while feminist scholarship on fieldwork methods often wrestles with issues of positionality and engagement at the scale of the individual researcher, this reflection is aimed at the broader scale of the professional (academic and practitioner) communities involved in development praxis and scholarship.     

Generation and Place of Residence in the Symbolic and Lived Identity of Maltese in Sydney,Australia

Maltese symbolic and lived identities are examined to explore the changes that occur in cultural identity between generations and place of residence within metropolitan Sydney. The results are employed to problematise Sandberg's straight-line theory, that is, that ethnic identity will decline with each successive generation. Our results, exploring ethnic identity in both its symbolic and lived-experience forms, confirm arguments that global cities are not homogeneous territories, as implied by Sandberg, but rather sites of cultural difference. The results suggest that, regardless of place of residence or generation, the symbolic Maltese identities remain similar, combating the old, naive assimilationist assumption that all immigrants would quickly abandon their ethnic identity, and favouring arguments supporting hybrid identities. Similarly, results for Maltese identity as lived experience suggest that their Maltese identity is less important only for those second-generation Maltese living in census collection districts with less than 10 per cent of the population born in Malta.     

Transition and Diversity in Rural Housing Provision: The case of Narrogin,Western Australia

The purpose of this paper is to examine the changing dynamics of housing markets in an Australian rural community. With reference to the case of Narrogin, Western Australia, it argues that there is an increasing disjuncture between the social and demographic characteristics of rural residents and the modal form of housing in country towns, namely the detached family house. Factors contributing to this disjuncture include the ageing of the population, the loss of traditional blue-collar employment, sub-regional restructuring of service provision, retirement migration patterns, and growing acceptance of the particular housing needs of groups such as the aged, the disabled, young and indigenous people. While it is clear that there is currently something of a mismatch between the characteristics of the population and the housing stock in Narrogin, it is also evident that a combination of political, cultural and economic factors form a significant barrier to adjustment in the local housing market.     

The world,the computer,and the mind: how Andrew Frank helped make human language and cognition cornerstones of geographic information science

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, cognitive science was included as one of the key disciplines in the emerging multidisciplinary field of geographic information science (GIScience). One of the key proponents and popularizers of the study of human cognition as part of GIScience – and one of its major researchers – has been Andrew U. Frank. In this essay, we review the history of Andrew Frank’s role as an innovator and champion for cognitive GIScience, and summarize some of his research contributions in this domain. Taken along with his contributions to other areas of GIScience, this review shows that Andrew Frank has been one of the primary figures in modern GIScience, and among its very broadest and intellectually-diverse contributors.     

Local Agenda 21 and Barriers to Sustainability at the Local Government Level in Victoria,Australia

At the 1992 Rio 'Earth Summit', Australia joined other nations in committing to processes leading to the formulation of 'Local Agenda 21s' (LA21s) by 1996. Subsequently, in the latter year, Whittaker carried out a national survey of local government authorities to evaluate what progress had been made. Whittaker's conclusion was that progress in Australia had been slow, but ten 'leading-edge' Victorian councils were identified through a self-reporting process. In this paper we discuss the concept of LA21, analyse in closer detail the 'progress' that has been made in the ten Victorian councils, and discuss some of the broader forces that, we argue, have made LA21 formulation increasingly difficult, particularly in the state of Victoria in the recent past.     

Climate Change,Bushfire Risk,and Environmental Values: Examining a Potential Risk Perception Threshold in Peri-Urban South Australia

Striking a balance between the management of environmental risks and values is a challenge for decision-makers. If people perceive that environmental risks are increasing they may be willing to discount local values to manage those risks, so the identification of thresholds in risk perception in relation to specific behaviors could help to avoid policy failures. The complex relationships between perceptions of climate change and bushfire risks, environmental values and support for actions to mitigate local risks are presented for peri-urban regions in South Australia. The results of a household survey (N=988) suggest that a threshold of risk perception in relation to climate change and bushfire management has not been exceeded and people are broadly supportive of balanced management interventions. A minority of people still do not perceive that climate change is increasing bushfire risk, and are supportive of risk mitigation interventions even at the expense of local biodiversity. However, a larger group believe that climate change is a driver of bushfire risk, yet are still more likely to prioritize ecological values and are unwilling to discount those values for risk mitigation. Targeted communication could assist different groups to respond to gaps in knowledge and action to facilitate effective, differentiated interventions within forested landscapes on the margins of urban areas.     

Erosion of Access Tracks in Kalamunda National Park,Western Australia: Causes and management implications

Construction of access tracks in national parks and other reserves in the south-west of Western Australia is an essential feature of park management. However, their construction was often carried out with little or no appreciation of soil and slope characteristics and potential erodibility, or the effect of slope and stream sedimentation on terrestrial and aquatic flora and fauna. This paper reports on the findings of a study carried out in Kalamunda National Park, a small reserve in the Darling Ranges east of Perth. Tracks were surveyed and the extent of erosion and sedimentation measured. Erosion-indicating and erosion-influencing variables were measured. Track alignment angle (to the contour) and track gradient were the two site variables most significantly correlated with measures of erosion severity. The most important upslope (on-track) factor was track length, and the most important upslope (off-track) factor was the abundance of granite outcrops. Seasonal conditions were important, particularly in relation to soils with relatively high clay contents. When wet, these soils were more likely to suffer from surface drainage problems and increased runoff, associated with decreased cohesion. On the other hand, the more common sand-textured soils are generally more erodible when wet. Several management measures are recommended. These fall into three categories: those relating to track closure or realignment (to avoid the most erosion-susceptible sites); those relating to actual track design and maintenance, or site management; and those relating to modification of visitor behaviour .     

Human Capital and the Structural Integration of Polish Immigrants in Australia in the First,Second and Third Generations

The Polish diaspora is one of the largest in the world. Australia's 2011 census identifies 48 611 born in Poland and 170 000 claiming Polish ancestry. Using the census, we assess the structural (socio-economic) and spatial integration of the first (Poles who arrived in the post-World War II period as largely displaced persons and refugees), second (their children) and third (grandchildren) generations, and compare the first generation with another cohort: the skilled first-generation (‘Solidarity') immigrants who arrived in the 1980s and early 1990s. Key OECD indicators of integration—education attainment, proficiency in English, employment status and occupational progression, home ownership, naturalisation, return rates and patterns of residential distribution—are examined. Results point to their successful integration, with high levels of labour market participation, earnings, and naturalisation, levels of spatial integration as exemplified in a Melbourne case study (where the highest proportions of those of Polish birth or ancestry reside), return migration and language retention, and levels of owner-occupied housing (the ‘middle-class dream') higher than among Australians generally.     

Exploring Social and Spatial Patterns in Private Vehicle Fuel Efficiency: a case study of Brisbane and Sydney,Australia

Australian cities have seen continued growth in private car travel that has resulted in increasing vehicle energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. While much research has shown that vehicle demand is related to urban spatial structure, very little research has investigated the spatial patterns of private vehicle fuel efficiency (VFE) and its association with socio-spatial circumstances in urban areas. This study has combined State-level motor vehicle registration datasets with standard vehicle efficiency measures that permit a comprehensive understanding of spatial variation of VFE in urban areas. A spatial-based technique was applied to explore intra-urban patterns in socio-spatial conditions of private vehicle efficiency in Brisbane and Sydney. In both cities, the VFE of the private vehicle fleet tends to be lower in outer suburbs than in middle and inner suburbs. The analysis further shows that by linking the standard vehicle efficiency measures to the entire urban fleet datasets the VFE outcome showed a moderate relationship to socio-spatial variables in both cities. The built environment and household economic status are more transferable factors that relate to the VFE across different urban contexts. Outcomes from this research are of relevance to policy makers charged with identifying highly oil-vulnerable communities and designing intervention strategies to improve household vehicle efficiency.