Veronica de Raadt, Luleå University of Technology: An Action Research of Community Fragmentation with an application of a Qualitative Decision Support System.

Veronica de Raadt will present a seminar of her doctoral project which she is currently undertaking in systems science at Luleå University of Technology. She will present a methodological and systems approach, and an analytical computer approach to studying the cultural and social sustainability of small communities. She has applied her research to Rosvik, a village south of Luleå. The focus of the study is on the crisis in education, related to cut-backs in the village school, and maintains that what is needed to address the problems in education is no less than the reconstitution of the whole community and the groups that make up the community. The study suggests that it is necessary to understand what constitutes community and explores the role of education, the state, competence, management and leadership, religion and the past on community life. She has collected data from village groups including families, businesses, the school, the church, political party and the village development group and applied a new qualitative computer approach that deals with theory and empirical data. She will demonstrate how the package combines the two in action research.

Veronica has a Bachelor of Social Work from the University of Queensland; she did her preliminary year for an Australian masters in sociology at La Trobe University; she completed her Master of Arts in Sociology at Idaho State University before becoming a doctoral student at Luleå University of Technology. She has worked as a social worker in Australia and the US, and taught sociology and research methods at Luleå University of Technology.

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John Cumberbatch