Veteran academic follows interests old and new

After a career of pioneering research in health psychology, Keith Chamberlain has taken up new pursuits – gardening and croquet. Not that he’s quite retired, reports Helen Vause.

Kerry Chamberlain grew up in Otago in a family of nine children. He still remembers the day when a reporter from the daily Dunedin Evening Star came to see his parents for the story of a family from which all but one of the kids had gone to university.

This educational advancement was something new in the Chamberlain family history, as it was for a lot of big working-class families of the day.

Turning 80 this month, Chamberlain is a Professor of Psychology who still has a passion for learning and inquiry. He currently has doctoral students under his wing and a line-up of demanding projects on his desk in Devonport.

He’s formally retired as a Professor of Social and Health Psychology at Massey University, where his research interests included health in everyday life and understanding disadvantage. But the work keeps coming in; looking back with the Flagstaff on his journey meant juggling commitments in a typically busy week.

With his academic workload diminishing when Chamberlain came to Devonport five years ago, he grabbed the chance to fill his ‘retirement’ leisure time outdoors, on the local croquet lawns and at the Ngataringa Organic Garden.

At the garden, he found himself becoming chair of the society before he’d barely turned over his patch of dirt.

At the croquet club, he proved pretty proficient at the game – and at manoeuvring the machine that paints the crisp white lines around the lawns. At their best in honour of visiting competitors recently, Chamberlain’s fresh white lines were noted as the finest and straightest painted at the club for a long time.

Quick to laugh and see the humour in most things, Chamberlain modestly says he’s just “a willing lacky who helps out” at the club.

His post at the volunteer-run community garden eventuated after the newcomer came up with far too many questions and ideas at one of the first meetings he attended.

His ventures into psychology too had a rather random beginning, he recalls, giving the short version of another good yarn.

“I had this girlfriend in Dunedin in my last year at school and I used to go around to her place for dinner on Sunday nights. I found a psychology book there and I took it home to read it. I thought it would be pretty cool to be a psychologist and so that’s what I started to say I’d be doing next. Not that I understood much of the book.”

When he got to the University of Otago, he found he’d been thwarted in embarking on his chosen vocation because courses and timetables weren’t aligning, so he joined the ranks of aspiring medical students.

The following year, he transferred to the University of Canterbury, and began his studies in psychology there.

At just 20, the penniless student married his girlfriend. They soon had two children and followed up with two more.

Big families, having no money and juggling lots of work were a theme of his early life, both in early academic positions and as a young public-service psychologist, working in traditional mainstream psychology.

Later, at Massey University, he would take a new approach in his field, and take his place nationally and internationally as a critical health psychologist prominent in promoting qualitative research within health psychology – psychology relating to physical health rather than mental health.

He worked with academics worldwide, exploring a relatively new qualitive approach to their research.

This led to Chamberlain and his fellow researchers informing their published work with the real stories of people they interviewed in depth.

They gathered the context of their subjects’ lives, gained insight into their perspectives and experiences, and uncovered underlying reasons for people’s behaviour.

In other words, rather than working with the individual in isolation from their everyday world, Chamberlain and fellow qualitative researchers were putting context into the picture of each subject, including factors such as their environment, access to healthy food and social connections.

At Massey University, Chamberlain started the first course in health psychology and worked with other researchers using the qualitative approach to learn how everyday life impacts well-being.

It’s a style that can and does throw up many one-off answers. “My mantra with my students has always been, ‘Yeah, it’s complicated’,” says Chamberlain.

On sabbatical, he was eager to get to Europe and mix with his peers there.

In stints working for the World Health Organisation (WHO) in the mid-1980s, he was an early member of a team developing the WHO quality-of-life index, designed to be a tool for getting a bird’s-eye view of people and populations in any place.

That snapshot would be taken from responses to a few simple questions, such as whether respondents felt in good spirits, the quality of their sleep, how active they were, and what sort of day they’d had.

Chamberlain has been a recipient of and a leader in teams regularly awarded Marsden Fund grants from the New Zealand Royal Society, which backs the country’s best and brightest researchers.

Though he’s retired from Massey University, he was co-leader of a national team that was awarded Marsden money three years ago for a new study that will throw light on the background stories of cancer survivors.

On this project he is working through Victoria University, where he’s now an adjunct professor.

The study, Exceptional Trajectories: transforming understanding of cancer survivorship, began in 2019.

Researchers have gathered the stories of 81 people who had survived cancers when they’d effectively been told to go home and prepare to die. They are people who have mostly won their battle after treatment for lung or brain cancer, when their situation had seemed unsurvivable.

In recording their stories, Chamberlain and his team want to know about the whole funded clinical trial.

Alongside this current project, Chamberlain is an editor of the academic journal of the European Health Psychology Society.

He has many other ongoing projects on his radar.

He mentions an approach for support from a university in India just this month, seeking input from this ‘world expert in well-being’. He grins and shrugs.

When will he fully retire? The gardening and the croquet lawns are beckoning.

“Well, you don’t get any less busy. It doesn’t really ever stop, because there’s always another interesting thing that comes up.” context of their lives and all the factors around their cancer journey.

Chamberlain doesn’t want to give any advice on well-being, but he does share a mainly vegetarian lifestyle at home with his partner Vivienne Lingard.

They’re fascinating stories, says Chamberlain, and they’ll provide the research team with rich material for future publications.

He says the researchers confirmed the dilemma of the ‘postcode lottery’: where cancer patients were living at time of diagnosis had a significant impact on accessing treatment or being able to be part of a

And buying an apartment in Victoria Rd simply made it a sensible idea to find himself an allotment to keep those all-important fresh vegetables coming.

“I reckon it’s the vegetables that have kept me in good health and kept me going, but of course I really don’t know that,” he chuckles.

But as the garden chairman makes his way through the thriving veggie patches, chatting to gardeners and then checking out progress on kitchen repairs – or heads out with his croquet mallet – the expression ‘the good life’ comes to mind.

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