About the Centre
The Centre was launched at UWA in 2018, in recognition of the need to better understand how values relate to challenging and significant research problems in society. The Centre’s aims encompass:
1. Research
Promote innovative interdisciplinary research that expands knowledge about values and how they relate to significant and important social issues.
2. Partnerships
Encourage partnerships between academia, industry, educators and policymakers to produce relevant and timely solutions to important social issues.
3. Training
Provide a high quality training environment for researchers, educators and organisations.
Professor Julie Ann Lee
Founding Centre Director
Julie is a Professor of Marketing at the UWA Business School, University of Western Australia. Prior to this, she was a faculty member at the University of Hawaii and University of Miami. She completed her PhD at the University of Illinois in 1996.
Julie’s research focuses on human and cultural values and the way they are expressed individually and in society. Her interests extend to the theory, measurement and application of values across the human lifespan. To enable this research, she worked with collaborators to develop and publish several innovative and effective scales designed to measure values in adults and young children. The most recent is featured on The Values Project.
She is currently Chief Investigator on two Australian Research Centre (ARC) Linkage Projects, involving the study of values.
LP150100434 “Dynamic relations between values and consumer behaviour: age and life-stage” was awarded $510,247 from the ARC, in partnership with Pureprofile and researchers from Royal Holloway University of London, UK, Vrije University, the Netherlands, and the University of Queensland.
This Project aims to understand the complex relations between people’s life goals and their consumption behaviour; exploring age, life-stage and cohort effects.
LP150100266 “Improving zoo/aquarium conservation learning outcomes: a values approach” was awarded $236,822 from the ARC, in partnership with 12 zoos and aquariums and the University of Queensland. This Project aims to investigate the influence of visitor’s values on their environmental learning and adoption of conservation actions.
Julie has published widely prestigious international Journals, such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Tourism Management and Assessment. She has also published two significant books: Marketing Across Cultures (6th Edition) with Jean-Claude Usunier and International and Cross-Cultural Business Research with Jean-Claude Usunier and Hester van Herk.
ABOUT
Dr Joanne Sneddon
Centre Co-Director
Joanne Sneddon is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Western Australia (UWA). Joanne holds a PhD (2009) in management from the University of Western Australia.
She studied management at Durham University and Curtin University. After obtaining her Master of Commerce and MBA she worked as a researcher at the Department of Agriculture and a lecturer in entrepreneurship at UWA.
Joanne’s research examines prosocial and ethical consumer behaviour and how personal values impact these behaviours. Her research has been published in journals including Assessment, Personality and Individual Differences and Annals of Tourism Research.
Over the past fifteen years, Joanne has been engaged in a series of research projects and consultancies for national and state scientific research agencies including the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, the Department of Agriculture and Food, the Department of Land Information, the E H Graham Centre and the new Cooperative Research Centre for sheep. Joanne also consults to Australian rural research and development corporations, Australian Wool Innovation and Meat and Livestock Australia, on innovation and research management issues.
In addition to her research work, Joanne was employed as a program manager for the Entrepreneurship and Business Development Unit at the Curtin Business School, and was engaged in the design and coordination of training and development programs for owner-managers. Prior to working in academia, Joanne managed M&K Marketing Services, a textile point-of-sale manufacturer in the United Kingdom.
ABOUT
Dr Uwana Evers
Centre Research Associate
Uwana is a Research Fellow at the UWA Business School, University of Western Australia. She currently works with industry research partner Pureprofile, is a BPS Chartered Psychologist, and has a PhD in Psychology from the University of Wollongong.
Her current research focuses on personal values and their impact on consumer behaviours, including sustainable lifestyles and charitable giving. She is especially interested in examining behaviour across cultures. She has expertise in behaviour change, marketing research and social marketing.
Prior to her academic post, Uwana spent a year in London working as a Psychology Research Analyst at Thomas International, a psychometrics company. She spent time with academics at University College London and the University of Hertfordshire working on projects in health, education, and dance psychology.
She has presented at numerous international conferences including International Congress of Applied Psychology (ICAP), World Social Marketing Conference (WSMC), and the Australian & New Zealand Marketing Association Conference (ANZMAC) and her research has been published in prestigious journals including Psychology & Marketing, Journal of Business Research, and Tourism Management.
PUBLICATIONS | ABOUT
Dr Oliver Rahn
Industry Liaison Coordinator
Oliver is an expert on human values with over 20 years’ experience as a senior business manager in a variety of organisations and industries.
Oliver completed his doctorate at the UWA Business School under the supervision of Profs Julie Lee and Geoffrey Soutar. His research investigates the effects of personal values and values-congruence on organisational outcomes. He currently provides organisational change consulting services to the industry, specialising in organisation and personal values and how these affect employee reactions to new strategies, including organisational change and transformation, as well as organisational culture development.
ABOUT
Dr Patricia (Trish) Collins
School Liaison Coordinator
Trish is an early childhood lecturer at Edith Cowan University. She completed her PhD at the University of Western Australia in 2020. Her expertise on children’s personal values and over 20 years’ experience teaching in early childhood make her the ideal school liaison coordinator for the centre.
Trish’s PhD research focused on the relations between children’s personal values and their wellbeing and behaviour. She also examined how children’s perceived social support from parents, teachers, classmates and friends impacted on values-wellbeing and values-behaviour relations. Trish and her colleagues develop and publish a new animated values scale for children (AVI and AVIr), designed to measure values in children from 5 to 12 years of age.
Prior to her academic life, Trish was a consultant for Early Life Foundation (i.e., Walker learning) and an early childhood consultant across WA for Catholic Education. She has expertise in the play-based learning, the National Quality Standard, Early Years Learning Framework and both the Australian and West Australian Curriculum.
Trish has presented at numerous national and international conferences including Early Childhood Australia conferences in Adelaide and Perth and the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology (IACCP) in South Africa and her research has been published in the journal: Personality and Individual Differences.
ABOUT
Karen Winter
Centre Research Associate
Karen is a PhD Candidate at the UWA Business School, University of Western Australia. She has worked for over 15 years in senior marketing roles for financial services and membership organisations in Sydney and London.
Karen studied marketing and human resource management at the University of New South Wales. Her current research investigates the relationship between values and value-expressive behaviours across contexts and their impact on subjective well-being. She has taught marketing and management courses for the past seven years at Macquarie University and the UWA Business School and has also presented several conference papers on human values.
ABOUT
Joshua Lake
Centre Research Associate
Joshua is a PhD candidate at the UWA Business School, University of Western Australia.
Joshua studied psychology political science at the University of Western Australia, before obtaining his Masters of International Relations at UWA in 2017. His research investigates the links between values and political behaviour, focusing on the relations between personal values, voting, and other individual differences in personality. He is particularly interested in the potential implications of value-behaviour relations for political messaging and campaign strategy. Joshua’s research has been published in journals including Personality and Individual Differences and the Australian Journal of Political Science.
ABOUT
The Centre for Human and Cultural Values focuses on research and training in understanding and appreciation of the variety of human and cultural values and how they relate to big social issues in society.