Rosa Lavelle-Hill

University of Copenhagen · SODAS

Despite the success of plastic bag charges in the UK, there are still around a billion single-use plastic bags bought each year in England alone, and the government have made plans to increase the levy from 5 to 10 pence. Previous research has identified motivations for bringing personal bags to a supermarket, but little is known about the individu...

Forty million people are estimated to be in some form of modern slavery across the globe. Understanding the factors that make any particular individual or geographical region vulnerable to such abuse is essential for the development of effective interventions and policy. Efforts to isolate and assess the importance of individual drivers statistical...

Understanding what factors predict whether an urban migrant will end up in a deprived neighbourhood or not could help prevent the exploitation of vulnerable individuals. This study leveraged pseudonymized mobile money interactions combined with cell phone data to shed light on urban migration patterns and deprivation in Tanzania. Call detail record...

Researchers have focused extensively on understanding the factors influencing students’ academic achievement over time. However, existing longitudinal studies have often examined only a limited number of predictors at one time, leaving gaps in our knowledge about how these predictors collectively contribute to achievement beyond prior performance a...

In recent years, machine learning has propagated into different aspects of psychological research, and supervised machine learning methods have increasingly been used as a tool for predicting human behavior or psychological characteristics when there is a large number of possible predictors. However, researchers often face practical challenges when...

We point out potential drawbacks of some of Leising et al.’s (2022a) proposed ways how personality science can be improved. We argue that it is ill-advised to use only one measure for a concept. Also, we argue that researchers should not refrain from conducting a study when a high level of statistical power is precluded. Then, we go one step furthe...

To understand human learning and progress, it is crucial to understand curiosity. But how consistent is curiosity’s conception and assessment across scientific research disciplines? We present the results of a large collaborative project assessing the correspondence between curiosity measures in personality psychology and cognitive science. A total...

This first-of-its-kind meta-analysis (N = 79 studies; 56,552 students; k = 640 effects) provides acomprehensive assessment of five cultural diversity climate approaches that capture differentways of addressing cultural diversity in K-12 schools. We examined how intergroup contacttheory’s optimal contact conditions, multiculturalism climate, colorbl...

With more researchers in psychology using machine learning to model large datasets, many are also looking to eXplainable AI (XAI) to understand how their model works and to gain insights into the most important predictors. However, the methodological approach for explaining a machine learning model is not as straightforward or as well-established a...

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are crucial for advancing research, yet they are time-consuming and resource-demanding. Although machine learning and natural language processing algorithms may reduce this time and these resources, their performance has not been tested in education and educational psychology, and there is a lack of clear inform...

To understand human learning and progress, it is crucial to understand curiosity. But what is curiosity? We present the results of a collaborative project assessing the correspondence between curiosity measures in personality psychology and cognitive science. 820 participants completed 15 personality trait measures and 9 cognitive tasks that tested...

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are crucial for advancing research; yet, they are time-consuming and resource-demanding. Although machine learning and natural language processing algorithms may reduce this time and these resources, their performance has not been tested in the field of education and educational psychology, and there is a lack o...

The analysis of fine-grained data on students’ learning behavior in intelligent tutoring systems using machine learning is a starting point for personalized learning. However, findings from such analyses are commonly viewed as uninterpretable and, hence, not helpful for understanding learning processes. The explainable AI method SHAP, which generat...

40 million people are estimated to be in some form of modern slavery across the globe. Understanding the factors that make any particular individual or geographical region vulnerable to such abuse is essential for the development of effective interventions and policy. Efforts to isolate and assess the importance of individual drivers statistically...

This thesis investigates what big data can add to the psychological study of human behaviour; and how Psychological theory can inform developments in machine learning models predicting human behaviour. It works through the difficulties that arise when the fields of machine learning and psychology meet. While machine learning models deal well with b...

Recommender systems and personalised marketing algorithms now proliferate our daily lives, harnessing similarity to other profiles to guide our purchasing decisions. Recent research indicates that this personalisation can be good for our well-being, as spending in a way that fits our personality, can engender happiness. Less well-understood however...

Despite the success of plastic bag charges in the UK, there are still around a billion single-use plastic bags bought each year in England alone, and the government have made plans to increase the levy from 5 to 10 pence. Previous research has identified motivations for bringing personal bags to the supermarket, but little is known about the indivi...

Analytic and holistic marking are typically researched as opposites, generating a mixed and inconclusive evidence base. Holistic marking is low on content validity but efficient. Analytic approaches are praised for transparency and detailed feedback. Capturing complex criteria interactions, when deciding marks, is claimed to be better suited to hol...

Analytic and holistic marking are typically researched as opposites, generating a mixed and inconclusive evidence base. Holistic marking is low on content validity but efficient. Analytic approaches are praised for transparency and detailed feedback. Capturing complex criteria interactions, when deciding marks, is claimed to be better suited to hol...

We teamed up with IEFP (the Institute of Employment and Vocational training in Portugal) to build a recommender system to help match job seekers to interventions which will enable them to get employed quicker. We mined 10 years worth of data of over 100 million interactions between job seekers and job counsellors to provide job seekers with intelli...

Despite the success of plastic bag charges in the UK, there are still around a billion single-use plastic bags bought each year in England alone (DEFRA, 2018), and politicians are currently debating whether to double the 5 pence charge to 10 pence (Rawlinson, 2018). Previous research has identified motivations for bringing personal bags to the supe...

Learning analytics (LA) is a developing area of practice in higher education institutions. The scope and consistency of the data available institutionally play a significant role in defining LA and, to date, limit potential applications. Enhanced applications of LA would be to support practitioners’ understanding on student learning with view to en...

Examining two different case studies in which machine learning methods have enhanced psychological investigation, compared with an explanation based approach. Case 1: Using random forests to extract which personality variables are most predictive of plastic bag purchases. Case 2: Using decision trees to understand the sub-groups and non-linear rela...