 Hi, my name is Chris, and I started the NZAVS in 2009. The reason I started it is because I wanted to answer questions about New Zealand, about the New Zealand population. Like, how is our identity changing? What are our values and our attitudes? I was born in Lower Hutt and went to Nine Eyed College, for anyone who knows where Nine Eyed College is. And right from a young age, I was very interested in groups. And, you know, how different groups in New Zealand work together, how we fit together, and what our identity is as a people. Growing up, you know, I heard that being in New Zealand, I meant liking rugby, and loving the outdoors, and being tolerant of diversity. All these sorts of traits, but really we don't know an awful lot about that sort of stuff in terms of the social psychology of how New Zealanders operate, what we're like, and how that might be changing over time. And I did my undergraduate degree in my PhD in social psychology. And at the time, most of what I was taught was from textbooks and journal articles based on undergraduate samples from the United States. And I remember sitting there in my undergraduate lectures thinking, well, does this really work here? Like, some of this is interesting. I loved the theories, but I felt like a lot of it didn't really explain what I could see in New Zealand society and my own experiences. And so the goal for the NZAVS, when I first got an academic position at Auckland, very luckily got an academic position at Auckland, I thought, right, I've got this one chance. I'm going to try and set something up to track change over time in New Zealand and people's attitudes and values. And as a new staff member, I got a $30,000 grant to start a research lab, and people would use this grant to set up like an entire research program, by lab equipment plan for the next few years, for whatever area of research they had. And I thought I'd take a gamble. And so I wrote one check, literally, and blew the whole $30,000 paying for postage and printing for a large-scale questionnaire, which we sent out to tens of thousands of people randomly selected all across the country. I had no idea whether people would respond. I had no idea whether I'd be able to keep it going over time. But we got a really good response rate. Lots of questionnaires came back in. I remember my office just being flooded and I just couldn't open them all. It was completely running the thing by myself at this stage. And it seemed to work really well. Lots of people were really interested in what I was doing. And so then by the time the second year came around, a lot of students had become very interested in the study. Other people were getting on board, and we managed to get enough funding to keep the study going for one more year. And I think after that second year, we really started to take off. Again, a large team of people came together who were interested in the study. A number of the students who were still involved in this project volunteered to help enter data and process questionnaires and just spent hours and hours just literally opening the mail for all these questionnaires. And they just did all that because they believed in the project. And now here we are. We're starting to collect data for our eighth year. We've got international funding. And we can really talk about what's been happening in New Zealand over that period of time. So I guess one aspect of the New Zealand identity in terms of doing things with number eight wire and ombudsmallow of an oily rag and so on, I think that's probably quite true of how we managed to get started at least.