Through our extensive experience in council community consultation we have conducted many research projects with Iwi and Pacific Island communities. 

Examples include work conducted for Western Bay of Plenty District Council, consulting with Te Puke Maori about local issues,  plus work conducted with under-privileged youth of South Auckland and Rotorua, which included participants from Maori, Rarotongan, Samoan, Tuvaluan, and Niuen cultures.  This work was mainly conducted in the 1990s but the researcher who conducted this work, Jonathan Dodd, is still an active member of the research team.

For most of the 1990's we conducted many projects for Manukau City Council, many of which required special sub-samples that targeted the Council's very diverse population - even the simplest library-satisfaction questionnaires sometimes needed translation into five languages!

In addition, our work for ASB Bank has sometimes required a special focus on Chinese customers, requiring Cantonese and Mandarin-speaking interviewers.

We also conducted extensive qualitative and quantitative research for Maori Television prior to their launch, which involved over 20 focus groups and workshops with Maori,  plus advanced attitudinal modelling to help with programming decisions.

Research Solutions has been really fabulous, every time I’ve called you to come in to present, you won’t just bring the data back like a phone book and say ‘here you go, there it is’, you will walk me through it, so I understand how you got to where you got to; I understand and am also satisfied that you were using the right people; which again validates the research and validates the decisions I need to make from that research.

I felt you gave great follow-up service when I asked you to come in and present to my commissioners – these were people who had never been in their positions before and were having to make really big decisions, and we had to base the decisions on the research you would bring back to us – and we felt happy about doing that with you.

~ Joanna Paul (former GM Programming & Production); Maori Television

 
Much of this work has all been conducted by Jonathan Dodd, whose Masters Degree in Social Sciences (University of Waikato) included papers and studies on contemporary Maori issues, Treaty of Waitangi, and cross-cultural comparative research techniques.  Bart Langton (Te Atiawa and Ngati Tara) was also heavily involved in the Maori Television work.