Centres of Research Excellence Fund

2006 Expressions of Interest

Centre for Advanced Methods and Policy Application in the Social Sciences (CAMPASS)

Director:  Prof. Peter Davis
Host:        The University of Auckland

Partners:   Motu Economic & Public Policy Research Trust
                 School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington

Abstract:

The central objective of the proposed Centre is to map and model New Zealand as a social system using advanced social science methods.  Our aim is to better understand “the way our society works” - with particular attention paid to the special circumstances of New Zealand in the areas of economic transformation, national identity, and families young and old – and thereby to advance social science and public policy.  While our primary focus is necessarily on New Zealand, the work of the Centre will have implications of international significance.

Operationally the Centre will function as follows.  It will use the Advanced Network to access and share data and to work collaboratively.  It will adapt an existing web-based framework for collaborative work – the Physiome Project – to facilitate such collaboration, and it will work by systematically mapping and modelling different institutional areas in the fields of society, the economy, culture, and political life.

The Centre will bring together a number of analytical and methodological “threads”: (1) a commitment to the use of advanced methods, particularly quantitative statistical techniques, laboratory studies, and simulation and modelling approaches; (2) a view that much more analytical value can be extracted from existing data sources, whether such data are drawn from official sources or are independently generated; (3) a vision that the social sciences, while drawing on varied disciplinary traditions, share the investigation of diverse arenas of human interaction and endeavour that combine individual and institutional levels of analysis and finally (4) the idea that societies are complex social systems that can be modelled as such and investigations in this area should be informed by developments in computational social science and in complexity theory.