Natalie Swann | University of Melbourne (original) (raw)

Uploads

Journal Articles by Natalie Swann

Transport Policy, Oct 28, 2009

Since the late 1990s, voluntary travel behaviour change (VTBC) has been an increasingly popular s... more Since the late 1990s, voluntary travel behaviour change (VTBC) has been an increasingly popular strategy in Australia, applied to reduce both reliance on the car and greenhouse gas emissions. Early efforts to evaluate the impact of this strategy were generally implemented by the agency that also implemented the policy and used small sample, self-report surveys. The paper starts out by discussing the nature and size of travel behaviour changes that are frequently expected in current policy, noting that these are often smaller than the sampling and measurement errors in traditional methods of measuring travel behaviour. The paper then discusses some alternative methods of evaluating voluntary travel behaviour change implementations using panels to reduce sampling error, and using a combination of personal Global Positioning System devices and odometer reading surveys to measure travel patterns. From these considerations, a number of guidelines are suggested for what is required to evaluate voluntary travel behaviour change. The paper describes three recent case studies in Australia in which such methods have been used and evaluates the methodological approaches used in these studies against the suggested guidelines.

Transportation Research Record: Journal of …, Jan 1, 2008

A six-wave panel survey of household vehicle use in Adelaide, South Australia, and Melbourne, Vic... more A six-wave panel survey of household vehicle use in Adelaide, South Australia, and Melbourne, Victoria, was reviewed, with odometer readings as the key measurement. The study was conducted to explore the feasibility of using this method to evaluate the effectiveness of voluntary travel behavior change (VTBC) projects implemented at the household level. Odometer surveys are a practically feasible, publicly acceptable, and reliable method for measuring change in household vehicle use. The collection of odometer readings was chosen because it was a direct way to quantify distance traveled in private vehicles that was difficult to manipulate or misreport. The panel design was useful to minimize variation, and burden was reduced by keeping the task simple. Although the sample obtained may have been subject to coverage error, the demography of the sample is stable over time; this status indicates that there is no selective dropout from particular population segments. The data collected in this pilot suggest that sample sizes upwards of 1,000 households would be necessary to conclude with 95% confidence that an actual difference in daily vehicle kilometers traveled (VKT) per vehicle of ± 1 km was significantly different from zero. Although the data here show that the average daily VKT per household and per vehicle in Adelaide stayed stable for VTBC nonparticipants and dropped in participating VTBC households, the small sample size means it cannot be stated with statistical confidence whether this was significant.

Road and Transport Research, Jan 1, 2006

An unusual TravelSmart intervention is being undertaken in South Australia, in which the interven... more An unusual TravelSmart intervention is being undertaken in South Australia, in which the intervention will take place over a period of about two years, using a variety of techniques to gain increasing acceptance from the population over that time. This paper describes the evaluation of the travel impacts of this initiative. Two new approaches are being undertaken to evaluate the travel impacts - an odometer panel and a GPS panel. The odometer panel will consist of about 1000 households that will be asked to provide the odometer readings from all cars used by the household every 4 months for a period of 2 years. The GPS panel will consist of about 200 households that will be asked to use wearable GPS devices for one week once a year for a period lasting just over 2 years (thus, participants will use the GPS devices three times). Panel attrition is expected from both panels, and participants lost through attrition will be replaced at each wave of each panel. This paper describes a pilot survey for both the odometer and GPS surveys, conducted in the period from March to August, 2005. The paper describes the methods used to recruit households, the data collected at recruitment, the procedures used to obtain odometer readings and to have participants use the GPS devices, and summarises the results from the pilot survey. The response rates to recruitment and completion of the panel tasks are noted for both panels.

Conference Papers by Natalie Swann

ACSPRI Conference, University of …, Jan 1, 2006

Transportation Research Board 87th Annual …, Jan 1, 2008

This paper presents the findings from a series of focus groups conducted with participants from a... more This paper presents the findings from a series of focus groups conducted with participants from a travel study which used personal Global Positioning System (GPS) devices. The focus group study was conducted during an on-going longitudinal GPS travel survey to understand the experiences of GPS users in our surveys, with a view to reducing the burden of the survey task, improving the quality of data collected, and capturing more complete records of travel. The feedback from respondents has guided our search for new devices, which are slimmer, easier to interpret, have longer battery life and are easier to carry. The focus group discussions made it apparent that more holistic and personal survey implementation, in which participants can contribute more to and receive more from the research project, would provide benefits to respondents by giving them additional confidence in using the devices and by building relationships between respondents and with the researcher. This will be of particular relevance in surveys employing a longitudinal panel design.

th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research …, Jan 1, 2008

29th Australasian Transport Research …, Jan 1, 2006

Publications by Natalie Swann

The Melbourne Anglican, 2022

Theses by Natalie Swann

University of Melbourne PhD Thesis, 2020

This thesis tells the stories of Christian migrants who all go to church in the same suburb in th... more This thesis tells the stories of Christian migrants who all go to church in the same suburb in the north of Melbourne. It explores the ways in which their faith journey and migration story are intertwined and seeks to show how the stories they tell echo the themes Christians rehearse when they remember, re-enact, and re-tell key biblical narratives.

Using Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and the work of theologian James K. A. Smith, I frame this remembering, re-enacting, and re-telling as ‘liturgical practice’. This liturgical practice is not limited to the formal wording of the church service but includes the habits of everyday church life and the faithful practices of Christians in their everyday lives. Smith’s articulation of liturgical practice owes much to Bourdieu’s conception of habitus, and I seek to draw the two concepts into conversation as I reflect on the migration stories my participants told me. The liturgical frame adds two facets to habitus; first, it is explicitly tied to a sacred text, and second, it is used to decode what people love and value rather than decoding power relations. I hope that this reading of the lives of migrant Christians contributes to re-shaping the way we talk about and ascribe value to the lived experience and emotional expressions of migrants in Australia.

This thesis shows how the stories Christian migrants tell about their journeys reflect the stories they know from faithful practice: for example, that they learn how to wait through stories of waiting for Jesus’ birth and second coming, that they learn about the significance of the body through the story of the incarnation, or that they learn about valuing suffering through the stories of wilderness experiences. Using this native framework to interpret the everyday practices of church life and the life stories of migrants helps identify the differences and draw attention to the continuities between three very different congregations. It shows how Australia is not the final end point or resolution of these journeys, but that waiting, suffering, and joy continue. Every Christian, but perhaps most especially the Christian migrant is always on the way home.

Radio and podcasts by Natalie Swann

Bigger Questions, 2020

Many thousands of people call Australia home each year, but how do they cope with the conflicting... more Many thousands of people call Australia home each year, but how do they cope with the conflicting feelings of leaving another home. We explore some big questions migrants face coming to Australia and how something bigger helped them in making Australia home.

Interview on ABC Religion and Ethics Report about the Australia Talks survey results on religion.