Projects (past & ongoing)

Looking for research collaborations? Or a supervisor for your research?

I am always eager to hear other people’s brilliant ideas .
Reach out to me at gerard[@]nus.edu.sg so that I can hear them!

Attn: Students! Research opportunities for the Summer holidays!

Note: some are possibly paid opportunities. All skills are welcomed!

  • Terms of conditions and Privacy Policies for digital mental health technologies in Social Services
  • Various online text-based counseling/engagement projects - Annotation of text data!
  • Help develop our first Singapore 🇸🇬 social work’s technology use standards?
  • Would you want to work on a large set of sociomedia txt data on sucide?
    • I am analyzing posts related to persons who experienced someone who killed themselves: e.g., “my friend killed herself last week”
  • First sector survey of tech usage in social work!

Technology/AI and Social Work

  • Sector survey of technology use in social services
  • Value-sensitive design research on use of tech tool
  • Informed consent in Terms of Service Use in online social services


Online Text-based Counseling & Tech Tools

  • Working on a large set of in-service text-based dialogues to understand text-based counseling using computational NLP methods
  • Role-playing in social work practice using LLM Role-playing Agent


Stepfamily Development

  • Stepfamilies research with specialist centre


Various Collaborations with Social Service Agencies.

  • Data Management and Curation: Best Practices. I worked with an SSA to establish “good-enough” practices in data management and curation.

  • Adoption Home Study Reports. I analyzed the assessment reports to understand the assessment processes involved in determining the suitability of prospective adoptive parents.


Text-as-data projects

  • Parents’ Corporal Punishment in Singapore Reddit Threads. I am analyzing the positional stances of Reddit Singapore posters from a corpus of about 1000 posts.

  • He killed himself: Dealing with grief from traumatic loss. I am looking at themes of grief among survivors of suicide victimes from a large of text from Reddit threads.

  • News Media Representations of Social Service Agencies During COVID-19 in Singapore. Analysis of 1,095 news articles in Singapore on SSAs using a corpus linguistic approach. [Website][Github][Article]

  • Text-mining news on Social Work Profession in Singapore. Text data analysis of 7000 news articles related to Social Work Profession in Singapore. [Github]

  • Annual reports of Social Service Agencies in Singapore. Narratives of Directors’ messages from 2017 to 2021. Project website coming up soon!


Meta-analyses

  • Parenting stress and children behavioral problems during COVID-19 pandemic. We investigated the effects of parenting stress on child and parenting outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic from 40 studies. [Website] [Preprint]


Parenting / fathers

  • Parenting During COVID-19 Circuit Breaker. A survey study conducted with parents in Singapore during partial lock-down Circuit-breaker. [Website]

  • Exploring the Role of Fathers in Singapore During the First 6 Years of their Child’s Development. A FGD study with fathers in collaboration with CHILD and SICS.


Other projects

  • In-Work Poverty and the Challenges of Getting By Among the Young. Funded by the Social Science Thematic Research Grant, this project seeks to gain new insights on the kinds of “in-work” poverty that the working class are experiencing. It will focus on the challenges faced by lowly educated young workers (aged between 21 and 40) and their efforts at advancement. [website]

  • GUSTO: Growing Up in Singapore towards Healthy Outcomes. GUSTO is Singapore’s largest and most comprehensive birth cohort study. GUSTO is an important nation-wide medical study that gathers data from parents and their babies, starting from pregnancy.[Website]

  • North Carolina State Administrative Data. Collaboration with Associate Professor Paul Lanier at UNC School of Social Work. To build predictive risk models with administrative linked data for children in welfare.

  • DADS CAN! Collaboration with A*STAR team to look at fathers and families. Website