I believe that Maori research can benefit immensely through the incorporation of a fuller range of appropriate quantitative methods to enhance the general qualitative approach to research problems adopted in this field. In the first part of this paper I outlined some of the strategies used in investigating problems relating to Maori language and cultural issues and suggested ways of applying statistical methods (where possible) to augment the analyses of the available data. In the second part of the paper I discussed a particular piece of research that I am currently involved in which looks at attitudes of bilingual speakers to spoken Maori. I attempted to demonstrate how the use of factor analysis and bi-plot graphs provide an interesting way of summarising and viewing the data which would not be possible without the use of these statistical techniques.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education