New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study

The New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (NZAVS) is a longitudinal study conducted in New Zealand. The NZAVS was started in 2009 by Chris Sibley, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Auckland. The NZAVS was inspired by major social surveys conducted internationally, such as the National Election Studies, the World Values Survey and the General Social Survey, and aims to provide a similar resource for New Zealand. As of November 8, 2016, the NZAVS research team had published 100 peer reviewed publications using data from the study.

The NZAVS uses a self-report inventory to collect information. The questionnaire is administered via both postal mail and an online survey. The NZAVS includes a large range of scales including those measuring self-esteem, national and personal wellbeing, satisfaction with life, religious beliefs, personality, psychological distress, ideologies, political and environmental attitudes.

The NZAVS has a nested data structure. Participants are modeled as the Level 1 or lower-level unit. The NZAVS contains geographic information from mesh blocks for each participant. Mesh blocks contain information about each participants local neighborhood based on census data from each meshblock. This information is modeled as the Level 2, or higher-level unit in many of the NZAVS research papers. Mesh blocks are small geographic area units, each containing roughly 100 people, with defined boundaries. Each mesh block is in turn nested within larger census area units (CAU; roughly 1000 people in size). Statistics New Zealand provide detailed demographic information about the population of each mesh block based on census data, such as median income, ethnic proportions and size, religious affiliation, etc. This information is integrated into the NZAVS datasets. Of particular note are the New Zealand Deprivation Index (an index of poverty or socio-economic status based on a principal components analysis of indicators of deprivation for each area unit); and a CAU-based Gini coefficient derived by Chris Sibley for use in the NZAVS, which provides an indicator of the income disparity within each region of New Zealand.

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