
Dr Andrew Whelan - https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8823-5642
IASH-SSPS Research Fellow, October - December 2022
Home Institution: University of Wollongong
Twitter: @andrew_whelan_
Andrew Whelan is a Senior Lecturer in sociology in the Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Wollongong in Australia. His current research focuses on how administrative media variously cohere and undermine organisations, and how this sheds light on usually tacit organisational ethics. He has published previously in journals such as Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Critical Sociology, Social Media and Society, and Sociological Research Online. He is currently writing a book for MIT Press, provisionally titled Destruction of Documents.
Project title: The DASS-21 (Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale-21) in institutional ethnographic terms
This project is about the DASS-21: a self-report questionnaire used internationally in a wide range of clinical and nonclinical contexts to measure depression, anxiety and stress. Drawing on institutional ethnography, the anthropology of bureaucracy, and the history of statistical methods, this IASH Fellowship approaches the DASS-21 as a key instance of a particular mode of statistical administration. The DASS-21 is a locus between care work, administrative, statistical and psychological knowledge domains. The form mediates and standardises the frontline service encounter for both parties, encoding the client as a commensurable score. Via statistical methods in psychology and psychometrics, DASS-21 data is applied in population mental health and in healthcare resource allocation decisions.
The DASS-21 document thus serves to structure social relations and action at a range of scales. As part of a larger research project about the history and emergence of algorithmic and big data governance, the DASS-21 is situated here as a politically consequential precursor technology to current and emerging applications of statistical data, such as predictive analytics in mental health. The DASS-21 teaches us not just about the history of algorithmic governance, but also about developments in the moral logic of public health administration.