Research Projects

• Year: 
  2017
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Dietary practices established in childhood track into adulthood. Understanding how dietary patterns in childhood become established therefore has implications for dietary intake throughout life.Wide variance exists in patterns of weaning practices and patterns of dietary intake in early childhood...

• Year: 
  2017
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NZ children suffer from very high rates of skin and soft tissue infections (SSTI). This project aims to determine whether colonisation with specific genotypes of Staphylococcus aureus plays an important role in SSTI in NZ. The GUINZ cohort children had bacterial swabs taken 54 months of age.

• Year: 
  2017
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• Year: 
  2017
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Starting ‘big school’ or primary school is a major transition for pre-schoolers. Many parents proactively prepare their children for the school environment. For others, there is little awareness of interactions or activities that enhance pre-schoolers’ readiness to learn and to engage with others in a school setting.

• Year: 
  2017
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  Internal
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Starting ‘big school’ or primary school is a major transition for pre-schoolers. Many parents proactively prepare their children for the school environment. For others, there is little awareness of interactions or activities that enhance pre-schoolers’ readiness to learn and to engage with others in a school setting.

• Year: 
  2017
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  Internal
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This project builds upon the work that has already been completed on child vulnerability and summarized in the Growing Up in New Zealand vulnerability reports.

• Year: 
  2017
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• Year: 
  2017
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  2017
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• Year: 
  2017
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• Year: 
  2017
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Exposure to alcohol during pregnancy is one of the prenatal risk factors that can negatively influence child development.

• Year: 
  2017
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  Internal
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Breastfeeding prevents infectious diseases, particularly, acute respiratory and gastrointestinal infections. Breastfeeding is also believed to prevent the development of allergic diseases and obesity and to enhance cognitive development. Currently we do not know what strategies would be most likely to increase the duration of breastfeeding in all NZ children.

• Year: 
  2017
• Access Type: 
  External
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The project will describe and predict respiratory hospitalisations in early childhood.

• Year: 
  2017
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• Year: 
  2017
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• Year: 
  2017
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The project will specifically examine associations within ethnic groups. In particular, rates of antenatal and postnatal depression and IPV are high among Pacific women. These analyses will consider the impact of these risks for Pacific children. The project will also consider whether IPV places children at increased risk on the SDQ, and also whether parenting behaviour and the quality of the parent-child relationship mediates this relationship

• Year: 
  2017
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  Internal
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Numeracy skills are important for social and academic success in modern society. The foundations of early numeracy learning are likely to include both inbuilt child abilities and the experiences they have within their environment.

• Year: 
  2017
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The aim of this project is to examine parenting at age 4 ½ years. We will validate the brief measure of parenting by conducting a factor analysis and examining associations with other aspects of parenting (9 months and 2 years)...

• Year: 
  2017
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  Internal
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A strong ethnic identity can be protective for mental and physical health when individuals experience social disadvantage. Our goal is to understand how important ethnic identity is to the mothers and fathers in the Growing Up In New Zealand study.

• Year: 
  2017
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This research builds on existing Growing Up in New Zealand analyses about residential mobility and focuses on how often the children and their families move house during the preschool period...

• Year: 
  2017
• Access Type: 
  External
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The project will determine the prevalence of family violence using the Pacific Growing Up in NZ families and identify the risk and protective factors relevant to preventing and enhancing Pacific family resilience to family violence and related harms.

• Year: 
  2017
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  Internal
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• Year: 
  2017
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  2017
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  2017
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• Year: 
  2017
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The proposed research will assess how the interaction of the home literacy environment and the physical environment of home can affect cognitive development during the first two years of life.

• Year: 
  2017
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  External
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The aims of this project is to examine the temporal trends in the duration and type of screen usage at 2 years, 45 months (3.75 years) and 54 months (4.5 years) in the Growing Up in New Zealand cohort. We will also determine the associations between screen usage at 2 years of age a range of physical, behavioural, and social outcomes. Response to technology use items at 2 years will be treated as exposure variables.

• Year: 
  2017
• Access Type: 
  External
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• Year: 
  2017
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  Internal
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NZ children have a high rate of hospitalisation due to infectious disease, and rates amongst Maori and Pacific children are higher than those for other NZ children. This project will identify hospitalisations for infection in the National Minimum Dataset of hospital admission data, and use the GUINZ datasets to identify risk factors for infection admission using unadjusted and multivariable analyses.

• Year: 
  2017
• Access Type: 
  External
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The study will investigate adherence to the nutritional guidelines for New Zealand infants.

• Year: 
  2017
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This study explores the association between nutrition and physical activity environments (policy and practices) in Early Childhood Education settings with measures of overweight and obesity in 4 year olds. We hypothesise that there is a ‘protective’ effect of attending a health-promoting ECE service, which can be confirmed by lower BMI outcomes for children, when adjusting for family and home characteristics. This research provides important information for the government’s Childhood Obesity Plan, particularly informing health promotion strategies in early childhood education services.

• Year: 
  2017
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  Internal
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Previous research has used NZDep to demonstrate a deprivation-health gradient for many health outcomes in the GUiNZ datasets.

• Year: 
  2017
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This study utilizes results from the “Who are today’s dads?” questionnaire. Establishing the role of contemporary fathers in the lives of their children can inform policy that enables paternal involvement in optimising their children’s developmental trajectories

• Year: 
  2017
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  Internal
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Compared to other developed countries, New Zealand has one of the highest rates of serious skin infections; particularly among children. Childhood skin infection hospitalisation rates have doubled since 1990. The reasons for this and the mechanisms by which environmental exposures lead to increased rates of skin infection remain unknown.

• Year: 
  2017
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  Internal
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This project aims to estimate the spatial and temporal distributions of New Zealand pre-school exposure to environmental hazards (e.g. air pollution, indoor and home neighbourhood environment, traffic-related impact, extreme climate conditions, chemical and biological exposures) for assessing the short- and long-term health effects, as well as their interactions with socioeconomic status, ethnicity, comorbidity, seasonality, infectious disease episodes and meteorological conditions.

• Year: 
  2017
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• Year: 
  2017
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  2017
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• Year: 
  2017
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The Growing up in New Zealand (GUiNZ) study presents an opportunity to understand IR relevant outcomes for families over time.

• Year: 
  2017
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• Year: 
  2017
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• Year: 
  2017
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This research focuses on the ethnic identification of the children of Growing Up in New Zealand. Measuring ethnicity clearly and consistently is important in order to make sure that comparisons between groups and across time are clear.

• Year: 
  2017
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  Internal
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This paper addresses how Pacific families in NZ interact with health information and health services in the early childhood period (2 years – 54 months). We’ll look at such things as attitudes to health care, the way health care and information is delivered, and the impacts of factors like language, migration history, community support and cultural beliefs..

• Year: 
  2017
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  Internal
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This paper addresses how Pacific families in NZ interact with health information and health services from before the baby is born to when the baby is 9 months old. We will look at such things as attitudes to health care, the way health care and information is delivered, and the impacts of factors like language, migration history, community support and cultural beliefs.

• Year: 
  2017
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  Internal
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This paper addresses how Asian families in NZ interact with health information and health services in the early childhood period (2 years – 54 months). We’ll look at such things as attitudes to health care, the way health care and information is delivered, and the impact of factors like language, migration history, community support and cultural beliefs.

• Year: 
  2017
• Access Type: 
  Internal
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• Year: 
  2017
• Access Type: 
  Internal
• Primary Classification: 
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This paper addresses how Asian families in NZ interact with health information and health services from before the baby is born to when the baby is 9 months old. We’ll look at such things as attitudes to health care, the way health care and information is delivered, and the impact of factors like language, migration history, community support and cultural beliefs.

• Year: 
  2017
• Access Type: 
  Internal
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Applying a developmental perspective, we want to understand how the presence of varying risk factors in the first 2 years of life create vulnerability for problematic outcomes at 54 mos and, at the same time, what factors across multiple domains (child, mother, partner, social/community, ethnicity) are associated with resilience in children exposed to high vulnerability, such that they avoid problematic outcomes despite their high risk status. Using GUiNZ we can pioneer an understanding of high risk exposure over time in early development and resilience in young children prior to entry into public schooling, and extend that to diverse groups in contemporary New Zealand.

• Year: 
  2017
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  Internal
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• Year: 
  2017
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