Foreword.

• Author: Jackson, Anne
• Position: Social Policy Journal

Issue 23 of the Social Policy Journal of New Zealand features papers submitted by keynote speakers from the "Strengthening Family Relationships" conference, held in Wellington in December 2003. The speakers, Paul Amato and Thomas Bradbury, are researchers at the top of the field of family relationships, and they have sent us papers based on the topics they spoke on at the conference.

The paper by Thomas Bradbury and Benjamin R. Karney is really three papers in one, as the authors tackle a series of three questions about the origins of variation in marital satisfaction over time. In addressing these questions, they draw extensively on their own body of work, with references to the wider literature. Paul Amato, in his paper, summarises what is known about the mechanisms by which children's outcomes are compromised when parents separate. He goes on to discuss what we know about the effectiveness of programmes that have attempted to ameliorate the effects of parental separation.

Ethnicity and its measurement are topics of ongoing importance, as evidenced by Statistics New Zealand's recently completed Review of the Measurement of Ethnicity (now available on http://www.stats.govt.nz/ethnicity). We have two papers in this issue that address significant aspects. Paul Callister reviews the recent history of recording ethnicity in the New Zealand Census, outlining the changes recommended by the Review. He particularly focuses on how best to recognise multiple ethnic membership and the implications of this for social scientists and policy makers. The paper by Tahu Kukutai deals with the questions of how to define who is a Maori and the significance of these questions for public policy. She provides an analysis of the issues and offers some solutions.

For many years research groups in government agencies have grappled with issues concerning how to do effective and ethical research in Maori communities. We have brought together three different approaches to this work for this issue of the journal. A team of researchers from the University of Auckland's International Research Institute for Maori and Indigenous Education, better known as IRI, describe the operation of Kaupapa Maori research in the course of the "Maori and Iwi Provider Success" research project. In their paper, Tim McCreanor, David Tipene Leach and Sally Abel discuss a small-scale, qualitative...