 My name is Carol Lee and I'm currently a master's student working with the NZAVS team and today I'll be talking about my honest thesis which was looking at New Zealanders attitudes towards vaccinations So this research was in collaboration between psychology researchers such as myself and also medical professionals So we had Dr. Isabel Duck contribute to our study as well so there appears to be a recent rise in vaccine safety concerns in many countries and this is associated with a lot of previous fraudulent research that suggest links between vaccinations and various illnesses or infections. So a famous example would be Wakefield study that looked at the link between the measles mump and rubella vaccine and autism lots of studies later found that this link was actually totally not true and it has been disproven and lots of studies across many countries using a variety of methods have found that vaccinations are safe despite all these findings a subset of the population still tend to be skeptical of vaccinations. In the NZAVS we measured people's attitudes towards vaccinations by asking them to rate on a scale of 1 to 7 their degree of support for the statement it is safe to vaccinate children following the standard New Zealand vaccine immunization schedule. So we had participants respond to this item on a scale of 1 to 7 where one indicated that there were strongly opposed to vaccinations for being neutral and seven being strongly supportive of vaccinations So we categorized participants responses into three categories where ratings of 1 to 2 were considered as being strongly opposed ratings of 3 to 5 were considered as being neutral or skeptical and ratings of 6 to 7 were considered as being strongly supportive of vaccinations. Okay, so we found that 68.5% of participants were supportive of vaccinations and 25.9% were neutral or skeptical and 5.5% were strongly opposed. So we also looked at demographic and psychological correlates associated with people's attitudes towards vaccinations and we did find significant psychological correlates, but it's also important to note that since we had such a large sample size these effects tend to be quite trivial. So for example, we found that those are high on openness which indicates being more open to new ideas and people who tend to seek novelty that those high on openness tended to be less supportive of vaccinations would suggest that these people tend to be open to more alternative ideas or conspiracy theories associated with vaccinations. We also found a very weak effect that those who had higher health satisfaction tended to be less supportive of vaccination. We suggest that perhaps this effect might be because those who have higher health satisfaction have more security in their children's health. So this is really risky because having good general health doesn't mean that they are protected against diseases that could be preventable by vaccinations. So what my study indicates is that the majority of New Zealanders tend to be supportive of vaccinations, which is a good thing, but then again a considerable amount of people tend to still be neutral skeptical, so it suggests that there is room for improvement. So I just lastly like to thank all the participants of our study and if it wasn't for them, we wouldn't have being able to find these valuable findings and we really appreciate the contribution.