Niki Harré
Biographic Data
| ID | 390965 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Niki Harré |
| GIVEN NAMES | Niki |
| FAMILY NAME | Harré |
| SIGNATURE | HARRÉ N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Auckland |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6378-324X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 97 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Collaborative, Action-Oriented Research in Asian Psychology: An Example From Singapore
Collaborative, action-oriented approaches to research are uncommon in Asian psychology. This is unfortunate as such approaches can support adaptive social change in Asian settings and enrich mainstream psychology by highlighting the values and principles of Asian countries. To address this, we describe a case study of a four-year participatory action research (PAR) project with a farm in Singapore. The first author worked with farm employees and …
Managing uncertainty: Group assignment tasks that encourage education as sustainability
Purpose This article aims to explore how group-based assignments can contribute to education as sustainability. More specifically, it investigates how the tasks completed as part of group-based assignments contribute to the development of students’ interpersonal competencies in sustainability-focused education. Design/methodology/approach A case study methodology was used to analyse students’ responses to group-based assignments in three sustaina…
Storytelling and good relations: Indigenous youth capabilities in climate futures
How can we support young citizens facing chaotic climate futures? This question is urgent, particularly for Indigenous communities who face disproportionate risks and impacts of climate change. For the past three decades, climate-related education has focused largely on the acquisition of scientific knowledge in instrumental ways, while encouraging individual behaviour change. This approach centres the problem rather than human capabilities to ge…
Understanding urban agriculture in context: Environmental, social, and psychological benefits of agriculture in Singapore
The purported environmental, social, psychological, and economic benefits of urban agricultural initiatives (UAIs) are context-dependent. However, little research has been done on UAIs in Asia, and to our knowledge, no research conducted in Singapore. This study investigated the benefits perceived by employees and volunteers at an UAI in Singapore, an Asian city–state, and how these benefits were achieved or impeded. A secondary aim was to examin…
Participation for a better future
Global systems of production and consumption are damaging the biosphere on which human life depends. We offer four vignettes from a variety of allied disciplines aimed at understanding vibrant “communities of action” for the environment in Aotearoa New Zealand. We outline how they help build, and build on, policies and institutions that regenerate people’s relationship to the land and protect natural ecosystems; and their struggles to create resi…
A People‐Focused Systems Approach to Sustainability
Creating organizations that promote human and ecological flourishing (i.e., sustainability) is a key challenge for contemporary societies. Here, we offer a people‐focused systems approach to organizational sustainability based on an action research project conducted at Western Springs College/Ngā Puna O Waiōrea, a bicultural high school in Aotearoa New Zealand. The project ran from 2008 to 2018 and drew on the values and skills of community psych…
Investigating the Call to Kindness: A Study with Community Participants in Aotearoa New Zealand
Here in Aotearoa New Zealand there is a 'call' for kindness often associated with Jacinda Ardern and the Covid-19 response.But how do 'ordinary' people experience and understand kindness?What do their understandings and the tensions within these reveal about the call to kindness?In 2019, we ran a Rōpū Whai Whakaaro/Values-based Practice course in Auckland with 21 community participants.As part of the five-week course, six women aged from 31 to 65…
Key competencies in sustainability in higher education—toward an agreed-upon reference framework
Introduction to the special thematic section: The importance of group identification, context and culture in promoting social action
This special thematic section is the first in a series of special sections that the Asian Association of Social Psychology (AASP) is developing for the Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology. Over the last four years, the AASP has guest edited one special issue each year on applied social psychology research in the journal in an attempt to encourage Asian social psychologists to engage in research that address real world problems in Asian societies. T…
Guiding Principles for Community Engagement: Reflections on a School-Based Sustainability Project
This article describes an action research project in which community psychologists worked with a school community to promote environmentally sustainable practices. Our research team had five guiding principles: strengths-based, empowerment, role modeling, communication, and measurement and feedback. Here we describe a phenomenological study of how we experienced our principles and how key participants from the school perceived our professional pr…
The Infinite Game: A Symbol and Workshop for Living Well Together
People are symbolic creatures, and generative symbols can help us understand the present and imagine the future. Here we describe a workshop based on the (symbolic) premise that life is composed of at least two kinds of games: the infinite game in which the key purpose is to keep the game in play and invite others in, and finite games in which the purpose is to win. The infinite game envisages a world in which all life-forms are celebrated and nu…
Sharing values as a foundation for collective hope
A widespread “tale of terror” amongst those seeking social change is that people in modern Western societies are caught in a neo-liberal paradigm and have come to care most about materialism, individual success and status. Our research attempted to challenge this tale. Study 1 involved New Zealand participants (N = 1085) from largely, but not exclusively, left-leaning groups. We used an open-ended process to identify their “infinite” values (that…
The Impact of the Project K Youth Development Program on Self-Efficacy: A Randomized Controlled Trial
Engagement and Mentor Support as Drivers of Social Development in the Project K Youth Development Program
Commentary on the Special Issue: Youth Leading Environmental Change
Understanding Change in Recycling and Littering Behavior Across a School Social Network
Understanding how communities change requires examining how individuals’ beliefs and behaviors are shaped by those around them. This paper investigates behavior change across a large social network following a recycling intervention in a New Zealand high school community. We used a mixed methods design, combining focus group data with social network analysis from two waves of a questionnaire that measured friendship networks; recycling and litter…
The Youth Adventure Programming Model
The literature on adventure programming indicates that it is a promising avenue for cultivating positive youth development, but little is known about the conditions that promote positive outcomes. Here, we propose a model for youth adventure programming based on a synthesis of the extant research. The youth adventure programming ( YAP ) model proposed in this article describes the critical features YAP offers; the experiential learning cycle that…
Inspiring Youth Sustainability Leadership: Six Elements of a Transformative Youth Eco-Retreat
We suggest that the transformations which inspire true eco-leadership are nourished by being immersed in the values and practices of a more sustainable way of living. We explore this using a case study of a New Zealand youth sustainability leadership program called Make A Difference (MAD). Run by Auckland Council, the program is centered on a 3-day hui (social gathering) for selected high school students. We observed the hui in 2011 and 2012, ran…
Young Maori perceptions of a youth development programme
Project K is a youth development programme that targets young people aged 14–15 years with low self‐efficacy. It is run by the Foundation for Youth Development. Story‐telling style interviews that asked participants to imagine themselves in a reality television show with different ‘episodes’ were conducted with six Maori Project K participants on the effectiveness of the programme and if and how it works with Maori ‘as Maori’. Results suggested t…
A Youth Performing Arts Experience: Psychological Experiences, Recollections, and the Desire to Do It Again
Stage Challenge is a performing arts competition for New Zealand secondary schools. This longitudinal study used observations, repeated questionnaires, informal conversations, and a graffiti board to follow the 5-month experience of a student-led girls’ team aged 10 to 17 years ( n = 103). The focus was on the quality of their experience and what contributed to and detracted from their desire to repeat it in future. Stage Challenge was affectivel…
Personal project commitment in adolescence: The role of relatedness, competence and integrity
University ( n = 175) and high school ( n = 162) students rated their commitment to three personal projects self‐identified as central to their lives, the extent to which each project generated experiences of relatedness, competence and integrity, and how much approval it received from significant others. This study compared the ‘life’ (hobbies, fitness, church, life transitions, intrapersonal, etc.) and education projects of participants who spo…
Interest in and identification with the birth culture: An examination of ethnic socialization in New Zealand intercountry adoptions
Interviews with 44 families in New Zealand who had adopted children from Russia or Romania found that parents’ interest in and children’s exposure to the birth culture were related to the children’s birth culture interest, but less related to their ethnic identification with the birth culture
The Gap in the Subjective Wellbeing of Māori and New Zealand Europeans Widened Between 2005 and 2009
Integrity, Efficacy and Community in the Stories of Political Activists
Narrative interviews were conducted with eight New Zealand long-term political activists to understand how they experienced their activism in relation to the psychological well-being concerns of integrity, efficacy and community. The interviews were analyzed using theory-based thematic analysis, and negative themes were subtracted from positive themes to give a measure of ambivalence. The results indicated that integrity (a sense of being true to…
The Ethnic Identification of Same-Race Children in Intercountry Adoption
Intercountry adoption is a worldwide phenomenon that has been drawing an ever-increasing amount of research attention. The vast majority of that research has focused on transracial adoptive relationships and, in particular, the ethnic socialization and adjustment of children adopted into racially different families. Very little is known about the ethnic identity development of internationally adopted children who are racially similar to their ado…
Life on the Seesaw: A Qualitative Study of Suicide Resiliency Factors for Young Gay Men
While considerable research has highlighted the factors that increase gay youth suicide risk, there has been much less emphasis on protective factors. Using grounded theory methodology, we explored the suicide resiliency in eight young gay men in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Common themes emerged, including positive social norms and conditions, high levels of support, identification with role models and high self-esteem. These were integrated with "know…
Key competencies in sustainability in higher education—toward an agreed-upon reference framework
The Gap in the Subjective Wellbeing of Māori and New Zealand Europeans Widened Between 2005 and 2009
Community service or activism as an identity project for youth
This article reviews the literature on community service and activism, particularly in youth, using the theoretical approach provided by an identity projects framework. This framework allows for an examination of the contextual and experiential factors that contribute to the emergence and maintenance of an identity project of service or activism. The contributors to project emergence may include: favourable social structures, collective crises, b…
The Ethnic Identification of Same-Race Children in Intercountry Adoption
Intercountry adoption is a worldwide phenomenon that has been drawing an ever-increasing amount of research attention. The vast majority of that research has focused on transracial adoptive relationships and, in particular, the ethnic socialization and adjustment of children adopted into racially different families. Very little is known about the ethnic identity development of internationally adopted children who are racially similar to their ado…
Integrity, Efficacy and Community in the Stories of Political Activists
Narrative interviews were conducted with eight New Zealand long-term political activists to understand how they experienced their activism in relation to the psychological well-being concerns of integrity, efficacy and community. The interviews were analyzed using theory-based thematic analysis, and negative themes were subtracted from positive themes to give a measure of ambivalence. The results indicated that integrity (a sense of being true to…
Intercountry Adoption of Eastern European Children in New Zealand: Parents' Attitudes towards the Importance of Culture
Virtually all of the research on the importance of culture in adoption has been on transracial adoption. Little is known about the importance of culture when racially similar children are adopted. Rhoda Scherman and Niki Harré interviewed 112 New Zealand adoptive families of primarily European descent, with 162 predominately Russian and Romanian adoptive children, concerning their experiences and attitudes about the importance of their children's…
Understanding Change in Recycling and Littering Behavior Across a School Social Network
Understanding how communities change requires examining how individuals’ beliefs and behaviors are shaped by those around them. This paper investigates behavior change across a large social network following a recycling intervention in a New Zealand high school community. We used a mixed methods design, combining focus group data with social network analysis from two waves of a questionnaire that measured friendship networks; recycling and litter…
The Youth Adventure Programming Model
The literature on adventure programming indicates that it is a promising avenue for cultivating positive youth development, but little is known about the conditions that promote positive outcomes. Here, we propose a model for youth adventure programming based on a synthesis of the extant research. The youth adventure programming ( YAP ) model proposed in this article describes the critical features YAP offers; the experiential learning cycle that…
Storytelling and good relations: Indigenous youth capabilities in climate futures
How can we support young citizens facing chaotic climate futures? This question is urgent, particularly for Indigenous communities who face disproportionate risks and impacts of climate change. For the past three decades, climate-related education has focused largely on the acquisition of scientific knowledge in instrumental ways, while encouraging individual behaviour change. This approach centres the problem rather than human capabilities to ge…
A People‐Focused Systems Approach to Sustainability
Creating organizations that promote human and ecological flourishing (i.e., sustainability) is a key challenge for contemporary societies. Here, we offer a people‐focused systems approach to organizational sustainability based on an action research project conducted at Western Springs College/Ngā Puna O Waiōrea, a bicultural high school in Aotearoa New Zealand. The project ran from 2008 to 2018 and drew on the values and skills of community psych…
Guiding Principles for Community Engagement: Reflections on a School-Based Sustainability Project
This article describes an action research project in which community psychologists worked with a school community to promote environmentally sustainable practices. Our research team had five guiding principles: strengths-based, empowerment, role modeling, communication, and measurement and feedback. Here we describe a phenomenological study of how we experienced our principles and how key participants from the school perceived our professional pr…
A Youth Performing Arts Experience: Psychological Experiences, Recollections, and the Desire to Do It Again
Stage Challenge is a performing arts competition for New Zealand secondary schools. This longitudinal study used observations, repeated questionnaires, informal conversations, and a graffiti board to follow the 5-month experience of a student-led girls’ team aged 10 to 17 years ( n = 103). The focus was on the quality of their experience and what contributed to and detracted from their desire to repeat it in future. Stage Challenge was affectivel…
Sharing values as a foundation for collective hope
A widespread “tale of terror” amongst those seeking social change is that people in modern Western societies are caught in a neo-liberal paradigm and have come to care most about materialism, individual success and status. Our research attempted to challenge this tale. Study 1 involved New Zealand participants (N = 1085) from largely, but not exclusively, left-leaning groups. We used an open-ended process to identify their “infinite” values (that…
The Impact of the Project K Youth Development Program on Self-Efficacy: A Randomized Controlled Trial
Engagement and Mentor Support as Drivers of Social Development in the Project K Youth Development Program
Young Maori perceptions of a youth development programme
Project K is a youth development programme that targets young people aged 14–15 years with low self‐efficacy. It is run by the Foundation for Youth Development. Story‐telling style interviews that asked participants to imagine themselves in a reality television show with different ‘episodes’ were conducted with six Maori Project K participants on the effectiveness of the programme and if and how it works with Maori ‘as Maori’. Results suggested t…
Interest in and identification with the birth culture: An examination of ethnic socialization in New Zealand intercountry adoptions
Interviews with 44 families in New Zealand who had adopted children from Russia or Romania found that parents’ interest in and children’s exposure to the birth culture were related to the children’s birth culture interest, but less related to their ethnic identification with the birth culture
Risk Evaluation, Driving, and Adolescents: A Typology
Life on the Seesaw: A Qualitative Study of Suicide Resiliency Factors for Young Gay Men
While considerable research has highlighted the factors that increase gay youth suicide risk, there has been much less emphasis on protective factors. Using grounded theory methodology, we explored the suicide resiliency in eight young gay men in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Common themes emerged, including positive social norms and conditions, high levels of support, identification with role models and high self-esteem. These were integrated with "know…
Intercountry Adoption of Eastern European Children in New Zealand: Parents' Attitudes towards the Importance of Culture
Virtually all of the research on the importance of culture in adoption has been on transracial adoption. Little is known about the importance of culture when racially similar children are adopted. Rhoda Scherman and Niki Harré interviewed 112 New Zealand adoptive families of primarily European descent, with 162 predominately Russian and Romanian adoptive children, concerning their experiences and attitudes about the importance of their children's…
Self-enhancement, crash-risk optimism and the impact of safety advertisements on young drivers
In Study 1, young drivers (aged between 16 and 29 years, N=314) rated their driving attributes relative to their peers. They also rated their likelihood of being involved in a crash relative to their peers (crash-risk optimism), their crash history, stereotype of the young driver, and concern over another health issue. A self-enhancement bias was found for all items in which self/other comparisons were made. These items formed two major factors, …
Community service or activism as an identity project for youth
This article reviews the literature on community service and activism, particularly in youth, using the theoretical approach provided by an identity projects framework. This framework allows for an examination of the contextual and experiential factors that contribute to the emergence and maintenance of an identity project of service or activism. The contributors to project emergence may include: favourable social structures, collective crises, b…
The Ethnic Identification of Same-Race Children in Intercountry Adoption
Intercountry adoption is a worldwide phenomenon that has been drawing an ever-increasing amount of research attention. The vast majority of that research has focused on transracial adoptive relationships and, in particular, the ethnic socialization and adjustment of children adopted into racially different families. Very little is known about the ethnic identity development of internationally adopted children who are racially similar to their ado…
Integrity, Efficacy and Community in the Stories of Political Activists
Narrative interviews were conducted with eight New Zealand long-term political activists to understand how they experienced their activism in relation to the psychological well-being concerns of integrity, efficacy and community. The interviews were analyzed using theory-based thematic analysis, and negative themes were subtracted from positive themes to give a measure of ambivalence. The results indicated that integrity (a sense of being true to…
Personal project commitment in adolescence: The role of relatedness, competence and integrity
University ( n = 175) and high school ( n = 162) students rated their commitment to three personal projects self‐identified as central to their lives, the extent to which each project generated experiences of relatedness, competence and integrity, and how much approval it received from significant others. This study compared the ‘life’ (hobbies, fitness, church, life transitions, intrapersonal, etc.) and education projects of participants who spo…
Interest in and identification with the birth culture: An examination of ethnic socialization in New Zealand intercountry adoptions
Interviews with 44 families in New Zealand who had adopted children from Russia or Romania found that parents’ interest in and children’s exposure to the birth culture were related to the children’s birth culture interest, but less related to their ethnic identification with the birth culture
The Gap in the Subjective Wellbeing of Māori and New Zealand Europeans Widened Between 2005 and 2009
Young Maori perceptions of a youth development programme
Project K is a youth development programme that targets young people aged 14–15 years with low self‐efficacy. It is run by the Foundation for Youth Development. Story‐telling style interviews that asked participants to imagine themselves in a reality television show with different ‘episodes’ were conducted with six Maori Project K participants on the effectiveness of the programme and if and how it works with Maori ‘as Maori’. Results suggested t…
A Youth Performing Arts Experience: Psychological Experiences, Recollections, and the Desire to Do It Again
Stage Challenge is a performing arts competition for New Zealand secondary schools. This longitudinal study used observations, repeated questionnaires, informal conversations, and a graffiti board to follow the 5-month experience of a student-led girls’ team aged 10 to 17 years ( n = 103). The focus was on the quality of their experience and what contributed to and detracted from their desire to repeat it in future. Stage Challenge was affectivel…
Inspiring Youth Sustainability Leadership: Six Elements of a Transformative Youth Eco-Retreat
We suggest that the transformations which inspire true eco-leadership are nourished by being immersed in the values and practices of a more sustainable way of living. We explore this using a case study of a New Zealand youth sustainability leadership program called Make A Difference (MAD). Run by Auckland Council, the program is centered on a 3-day hui (social gathering) for selected high school students. We observed the hui in 2011 and 2012, ran…
The Youth Adventure Programming Model
The literature on adventure programming indicates that it is a promising avenue for cultivating positive youth development, but little is known about the conditions that promote positive outcomes. Here, we propose a model for youth adventure programming based on a synthesis of the extant research. The youth adventure programming ( YAP ) model proposed in this article describes the critical features YAP offers; the experiential learning cycle that…
Understanding Change in Recycling and Littering Behavior Across a School Social Network
Understanding how communities change requires examining how individuals’ beliefs and behaviors are shaped by those around them. This paper investigates behavior change across a large social network following a recycling intervention in a New Zealand high school community. We used a mixed methods design, combining focus group data with social network analysis from two waves of a questionnaire that measured friendship networks; recycling and litter…
Commentary on the Special Issue: Youth Leading Environmental Change
The Infinite Game: A Symbol and Workshop for Living Well Together
People are symbolic creatures, and generative symbols can help us understand the present and imagine the future. Here we describe a workshop based on the (symbolic) premise that life is composed of at least two kinds of games: the infinite game in which the key purpose is to keep the game in play and invite others in, and finite games in which the purpose is to win. The infinite game envisages a world in which all life-forms are celebrated and nu…
Sharing values as a foundation for collective hope
A widespread “tale of terror” amongst those seeking social change is that people in modern Western societies are caught in a neo-liberal paradigm and have come to care most about materialism, individual success and status. Our research attempted to challenge this tale. Study 1 involved New Zealand participants (N = 1085) from largely, but not exclusively, left-leaning groups. We used an open-ended process to identify their “infinite” values (that…
The Impact of the Project K Youth Development Program on Self-Efficacy: A Randomized Controlled Trial
Engagement and Mentor Support as Drivers of Social Development in the Project K Youth Development Program
Guiding Principles for Community Engagement: Reflections on a School-Based Sustainability Project
This article describes an action research project in which community psychologists worked with a school community to promote environmentally sustainable practices. Our research team had five guiding principles: strengths-based, empowerment, role modeling, communication, and measurement and feedback. Here we describe a phenomenological study of how we experienced our principles and how key participants from the school perceived our professional pr…
Introduction to the special thematic section: The importance of group identification, context and culture in promoting social action
This special thematic section is the first in a series of special sections that the Asian Association of Social Psychology (AASP) is developing for the Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology. Over the last four years, the AASP has guest edited one special issue each year on applied social psychology research in the journal in an attempt to encourage Asian social psychologists to engage in research that address real world problems in Asian societies. T…
Key competencies in sustainability in higher education—toward an agreed-upon reference framework
Investigating the Call to Kindness: A Study with Community Participants in Aotearoa New Zealand
Here in Aotearoa New Zealand there is a 'call' for kindness often associated with Jacinda Ardern and the Covid-19 response.But how do 'ordinary' people experience and understand kindness?What do their understandings and the tensions within these reveal about the call to kindness?In 2019, we ran a Rōpū Whai Whakaaro/Values-based Practice course in Auckland with 21 community participants.As part of the five-week course, six women aged from 31 to 65…
Participation for a better future
Global systems of production and consumption are damaging the biosphere on which human life depends. We offer four vignettes from a variety of allied disciplines aimed at understanding vibrant “communities of action” for the environment in Aotearoa New Zealand. We outline how they help build, and build on, policies and institutions that regenerate people’s relationship to the land and protect natural ecosystems; and their struggles to create resi…
Psychology (25 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Social Psychology (15 works) · Political science (14 works) · Developmental psychology (13 works) · Community Health and Development (9 works) · Medicine (9 works) · Pedagogy (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Youth Development and Social Support (8 works)