Monash Arts secures National Intelligence and Security Discovery Research Grant
A Monash Arts initiated project, led by the School of Social Sciences’ (SoSS) Professor Robert Thomson, has won a prestigious research grant under the National Intelligence and Security Discovery Research Grants (NISDRG) scheme for 2022.
The project, ‘The Nexus of Public and Elite Opinions: Implications for Policies and Institutions’, has been awarded $598,793.
The project aims to garner greater knowledge of how public and elite opinions affect the policies and political institutions of Australia’s main trading partners, including China and India, thereby strengthening our ability to understand and anticipate stability and change in other countries’ policies and institutions. It expects to generate insights into economic and environmental policies, trade openness and adversarial international behaviour.
The study will combine established qualitative methods from social sciences with new automated methods from computer science and Professor Thomson will be leading a team of researchers that includes Professor Dharmalingam Arunachalam (SoSS), Dr Yuan-Fang Li (Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University) and Associate Professor Delia Lin (The University of Melbourne).
Describing the methodology, Professor Thomson explains, “…our research combines insights from political science, sociology and area studies, as well as established qualitative methods from the social sciences and automated methods from computer science. The research will include broad quantitative comparative analyses of many countries and extensive in-depth case studies…this multidisciplinary and mixed-methods approach is one of the most promising features of the project.”
The grant is the first to be awarded to Monash University through the NISDRG scheme since it was first introduced in 2021, and is one of just six grants awarded nationally in the 2022 round.
Visit the School of Social Sciences website to learn more about study and research opportunities within the school.