KOTZUR LAB
RESEARCH ON INTERGROUP RELATIONS | DURHAM UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH
ON INTERGROUP RELATIONS | DURHAM UNIVERSITY
DR PATRICK KOTZUR
Patrick Kotzur is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Durham University.
Research interests include:
Intergroup Conflicts
Stereotypes
Prejudice
Discrimination
Intergroup Contact
Diversity and Inclusion
THE LAB
The lab is based in the Quantitative Social Psychology Group (QSP) in the Department of Psychology at Durham University in beautiful Durham, UK, and has access to a wide range of facilities and equipment. To address our research questions, we collaborate with colleagues all over the world, and employ state-of-the art methods and research designs.
The Quantitative Social Psychology Group at Durham University is one of the largest social psychology groups in the UK. Durham University is ranked as one of the World Top 100 Universities in the QS World University Rankings (2022), whereas the Psychology Department is ranked in the Top 10 within the UK (Complete University Guide 2022).
OUR TEAM
Current Lab Members
DR PATRICK KOTZUR
Patrick Kotzur is an Assistant Professor in Psychology in the Quantitative Social Psychology Group at Durham University, and director of this lab.
He is very interested in intergroup conflicts. For example, he is interested in what factors and processes shape how we respond to people we feel do not belong to "us", as well as the consequences of these perceptions. His current work focusses on questions related to stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination; that is, how we preceive others, why we perceive them as such, what consequences these perceptions have, and how to change these perceptions.
Patrick studied Intercultural Relations and Behaviour at Jacobs University (Germany) and Applied Social Psychology at Sussex University (UK). He received a Dr. rer. nat. (PhD equivalent) in Psychology from the University of Marburg (Germany) and worked as a postdoc at the University of Osnabrück (Germany).
In his free time, Patrick plays the piano and hits the gym every now and again. He likes to meet up with his awesome friends and colleagues for walks and trips in and around beautiful Durham area. He also has a thing for "Plants vs. Zombies 2" and can't stop levelling up his plants.
Connect with me via:
PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS
This is a selection of current and recent projects we work(ed) on in our lab.
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The PEACE4Youth Project - Improving Relations between Young People from Protestant and Catholic Communities (ongoing)
The PEACE4Youth programme is a EU-funded programme (37.6m €) facilitating intergroup contact between marginalized young people from Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland and the Border Region in the Republic of Ireland. The programme aims to enhance the capacity of children and young people to form positive and effective relationships with others of a different background and make a positive contribution to building a cohesive society. Across two phases of the programme approximately 7,932 young people participated in cross-community projects focused on good relations, citizenship, and personal development.
Dr Patrick Kotzur recently joined the Centre for Identity and Intergroup Relations Evaluation Team consisting of PIs Dr Danielle Baylock, Dr Stephanie Burns, Prof Rhiannon Turner, and Dr Laura Taylor, as well as collaborators Prof Linda Tropp and Dr Alexander O'Donnell to investigate the distance travelled on good relations, personal development, and citizenship as a result of this intergroup contact programme.
Want to find out more? See https://www.seupb.eu/current-programmes/peace-iv/evaluations/children-and-young-people-14-24-impact-evaluation or contact Dr Patrick Kotzur for more info!
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Coping with Corona Project (ongoing)
“How do different people cope with the changes and restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic?”
“Why do people differ in their well-being during the pandemic and the subsequent return to normality?”
We are tackling these questions in our joint research project “Coping with Corona” (CoCo), which is financed by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) awarded to Prof. Mitja Back, University of Münster, Prof. Maarten van Zalk, University of Osnabrück, and Prof. Markus Bühner, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich.
For us, understanding the individual mechanisms operating in our daily lives is key to coping with future crises and a successful return to normality. To develop this understanding, we collaborate internationally with over 50 renowned project partners from different disciplines (e.g., USA, Australia, Israel, Argentina, Brazil, Sweden, Germany...) and apply cutting-edge methods of data collection (e.g., smartphone sensing, experience sampling) to achieve reliable insights that are as close as possible to our everyday lifes.
Do you want to find out more? Feel free to check out our project website and the open-access paper summarizing this project: https://coco-study.org/en/
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Introducing a ShinyApp to speed up preliminary analyses which involve group comparisons - introducing ACAMIA (Automated Algorithmic Data Analysis for Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Invariance Assessment) (concluded)
Researchers who compare survey-generated mean values of scales across some sort of unit (e.g., across groups) spend a lot of time checking whether pre-conditions for such comparisons are met; including validity and reliability checks of the construct (e.g., using confirmatory factor analyses to check the factor structure of the construct, checking for the reliability of scales computing McDonald's Omegas, or testing for measurement invariance across the units of comparisons, i.e., to what extent the scale measures the same construct across several groups). To support researchers with these important preliminary tasks, and to speed up the process, especially for many group comparisons, we have developed ACAMIA, a ShinyApp which we introduce in the paper below. It contains a step-by-step guide how to use the ShinyApp, and why such analyses are important to conduct in the first place. We hope to offer a unique tool that will be useful to researchers across the whole breadth of psychology and beyond who do survey-based group comparisons, and would love for the tool to free up researchers' time to focus on the more enjoyable aspects of research - e.g., having a coffee with colleagues - or two!
If you have questions, comments, or suggestions, please don't hestitate to get in touch and check out the paper below:
Schemmerling, M., Kotzur, P. F., & Friehs, M.-T. (in press). Automated algorithmic data analysis for confirmatory factor analysis and invariance assessment - A tutorial for ACAMIA. Social Cognition.
PUBLISHED WORK
