Studies, methods and ethics
Find out about the NZ Attitudes and Values Study, Thematic Analysis, Story Completion, Animal Minds lab, and Māori and Pacific Psychology Research ethics.
Animal Minds lab
Find out more about our three animal labs; New Caledonian Crow, Clever Canine Lab and the Kea Lab.
Early Learning Lab, Auckland (ELLA)
The Early Learning Lab, Auckland (ELLA) is made up of a group of researchers devoted to understanding how babies, toddlers and young children learn and understand the world around them.
Māori and Pacific Research
Māori and Pacific Psychology Research Group (MPPRG)
MPPRG is an initiative to create an inclusive and dynamic space for Māori and Pasifika students in the School of Psychology to motivate, inspire and support each other through the research process.
Māori and Pacific Psychology research ethics
To support non-Māori staff and postgraduate researchers who wish to include Māori and Pacific people as part of their research, and do so in a way that treats all those involved respectfully.
The New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (NZAVS)
The New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (NZAVS) is a 20-year longitudinal national probability study of social attitudes, personality and health outcomes of more than 60,000 New Zealanders.
The NZAVS is led by Professor Chris Sibley and is unique to New Zealand.
Story completion
Story completion offers qualitative researchers a way of generating data for qualitative research that is quite different to most common methods: most qualitative research involves generating first-person accounts of experiences, views, practices and so on.
With story completion, participants are invited to write a story in response to a story ‘stem’ or ‘cue’, a hypothetical scenario created by the researcher.
Thematic analysis
Thematic analysis (TA) is a popular method for analysing qualitative data in many disciplines and fields, and can be applied in lots of different ways, to lots of different datasets, to address lots of different research questions!
It is one of a cluster of methods that focus on identifying patterned meaning across a dataset.
TA is best thought of as an umbrella term for a set of approaches for analysing qualitative data that share a focus on identifying themes (patterns of meaning) in qualitative data. The different versions of TA tend to share some degree of theoretical flexibility but can differ enormously in terms of both underlying philosophy and procedures for producing themes.
We have developed a widely-cited approach to TA that is theoretically flexible, characterised by its foregrounding of researcher subjectivity.