Projects
We undertake social research projects on specific population groups, and host students working on honours, masters, and PhD projects. We also use microsimulation methods to model groups within the population, and changes in their demographics each year as they age.
A Better Start: E Tipu E Rea
A Better Start is one of the National Science Challenges established by the Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment in 2014.
Antidepressant Use and Depression Symptoms in Pregnancy
This project provides evidence that both depression and antidepressant use during pregnancy are associated with adverse birth and later child outcomes.
Application of Big Data Analytic Techniques to Identify New Risk Factors for Sudden Unexplained Death in Infancy (SUDI)
This project examined the association between SUDI and service contacts recorded in the IDI.
Assessing the Impact of Maternal and Perinatal Interventions on Lifelong Health
This project followed up cohorts from several maternal and perinatal randomised controlled trials conducted in the 1970s.
Assessing the Impact of Sex Work Decriminalisation: A Feasibility Study
This project assesses the feasibility of identifying sex workers using the IDI.
Assessing the Impact of the “Families Package” on Child and Maternal Wellbeing
This project investigates the “Families Package”, which was introduced in 2018 to improve the material wellbeing of families, but had not previously been scrutinised in terms of its impact on child outcomes.
Associations Between Mental Health and Housing
This project uses the New Zealand Health Survey to describe how housing affordability influences mental health.
Balance of Care in an Ageing Society
This project extended earlier microsimulation work on health outcomes for older age groups, adding in the impact of long-term, disabling, and chronic conditions.
Better Start Model
This project uses dynamic closed-cohort microsimulation to model early life-course development through to 24 years of age, using findings from interventions as part of “A Better Start”.
Building a Responsive Research Infrastructure for Climate- and Conflict-Induced Displacement in the Asia-Pacific Region
This project aims to develop research networks across the region and to build the capacity of Pacific researchers.
Building a Sustainable Gender Budgeting Strategy for New Zealand
This project used administrative data to develop a comprehensive picture of the status of women in New Zealand.
Burden of Multiple Myeloma in New Zealand
This project produced the first report of the human and economic costs of myeloma in New Zealand.
Changing Pacific Household Composition and Wellbeing 1981–2006
This project utilised our previously created family wellbeing indicators to present the situation for Pacific families. This was accompanied by a qualitative study of 12 Pacific families living in Auckland.
Characteristics and Healthcare Access of People Living with Multiple Sclerosis
This project describes the socioeconomic characteristics of people living with multiple sclerosis, and their access to health and social services.
Child Poverty Health Consequences
This project looked into the most effective ways to reduce the impacts of childhood poverty on health.
Diabetes Cohort Study
This project established relationships among various risk factors and adverse outcomes for people living with diabetes.
Do Infections Raise Risk of Dementia?
This project assesses associations among various infections and subsequent dementia over a 30-year period, hoping to contribute to improved treatments and prevention efforts.
Do Psychiatric Disorders Predict Later Physical Diseases?
This project examines the impact of hospitalisation for mental disorders on the occurrence of future chronic diseases.
Do the Environments Young People Grow Up in Promote or Obstruct Mental Health? A Nationwide Geospatial Study
This project examines the associations between the environments in which people grow up, in terms of deprivation and especially access to nature, and their experience of mental health issues in youth.
Enhancing Hospital Outcomes
This project linked several administrative health datasets and examined many trends over the 2001–2009. It contributed hard evidence on the productivity and effectiveness of investment in hospitals and related services.
Estimating the Accuracy of Ethnicity Data in Health Datasets
This project compared self-reported ethnicity data from the New Zealand Cancer Registry with the equivalent from Primary Health Organisation records, to assess potential undercounting, suspected to especially affect Māori.
Ethnolinguistic Diversity in New Zealand
This project describes populations in New Zealand that speak the most common foreign languages – those with at least 10,000 speakers as per the census. This work has been updated as new censuses have been released, and new languages have met the criterion.
Examining Trends in Future Tertiary Provision Given Demographic Projection
This project examined retention rates of students moving from school to university, and forecasted expected student numbers for each faculty, with particular interest in STEM subjects.
Hospital Restructuring
This project assesses the effect of major health system reforms on the quality of patient care over the 1988–2001 period.
Inequality in Service Uptake: A Comparative Study
This project explores inequalities in the uptake of welfare services, including international comparisons with Denmark and the USA.
Informing Tribal Activity and Investment Through Scientific Reporting
This project described the Ngāi Tahu population based on cross-sectional census data, enabling the iwi organisation to track where it was missing people, especially in terms of age group where it was known that younger children were less likely to be registered as members.
Integrated Data Infrastructure Support for Learner Pathways Analysis: Following a Cohort Over Time to Analyse Learner Pathways and the Relative “Success” of These Pathways
This project followed a cohort of learners to provide insights into the different learning pathways people take in their lives.
Intergenerational Analysis in the IDI
This project investigated the extent to which intergenerational links were preserved in the construction of the IDI.
International Social Survey Programme
This project represents our annual survey as members on this international programme. Topics cycle over approximately a decade and COMPASS has been running the survey for New Zealand since 2013.
Investigating Adolescent Health
This project examined data from the UK-based INCLUSIVE trial, which aimed to improve school environments especially with regard to bullying.
Knowledge Laboratory of the Early Life-Course
This project produced a microsimulation tool describing the lives of young people through the age of 18. This was an evolution of our previous model of the early life-course, extending the age range and incorporating estimates from international studies where we did not have local data.
Kumanu Tāngata: The Aftermatch Project
This project describes the experiences of professional rugby union players in terms of their future experience of neurogenerative disease, cardiovascular disease, mental disorders, and mortality.
Life-Course Impact of Chronic Health Conditions: A family & Whānau Perspective
This project was in four parts including quantitative data analysis and in-depth qualitative studies of families living with chronic disease, and described their experiences.
Life-Course Predictors of Mortality Inequalities
This project linked StatsNZ’s Longitudinal Census product with the New Zealand Census Mortality Study, to assess socioeconomic influences on mortality and if there are life-course factors that are protective against socioeconomic disadvantage.
Loneliness Across the Life-Course
This project investigated how loneliness and social isolation develop through the life-course, identified risk factors associated with their development, and described outcomes associated with the experience of them.
Māori in Between
This project examined levels of cultural knowledge among Māori and assessed if these were associated with any differences in their experiences of accessing health and social services.
Mental Health in Young People with Brain Injury
This project describes mental health problems experienced and services accessed by young people with acquired or traumatic brain injury.
Modelling Social Change in New Zealand: Social Simulation Applied to a Census Test-Bed
This project explored two aspects of social change through analysis of census data from 1981 to 2001: choices of cohabitation partners especially in regard to similar or different ethnicity and level of education; and residential segregation over time and how that relates to ethnicity and socioeconomic status.
National Primary Medical Care Survey
This project was a large-scale survey of the entire primary health care system, describing patient experiences in terms of diagnoses and prescriptions, and numerous comparisons among different types of practices, as well as a comparison to experiences in hospital emergency departments.
National Survey of Early Career Researchers in Aotearoa New Zealand
This project was a survey run by Dr Tom Baker in the School of Environment, to describe the experiences, attitudes, and professional intentions of early career researchers in New Zealand.