Janine Lurie

Teaching and Advising

Janine began her academic career in 1998 teaching first year statistics in psychology and has remained firmly entrenched in the statistics teaching space since then. She has taught statistics extensively across first year through to postgraduate levels. From 2008 onwards Janine has also taken on the role of statistics and research methodology advisor to students conducting their fourth year, masters, and doctoral research. This advisor role has seen her collaborate with researchers in a wide range of research areas. Janine has served as a specialist Associate Editor and Methodological Consultant on the Editorial Boards of the Australian Journal of Psychology, Australian Psychologist, and Clinical Psychologist journals published by the Australian Psychological Society since 2019.

Janine also teaches in the areas of psychometrics, pesonality, health psychology, and developmental psychology.

Research Focus

Janine's research passions lay in two key areas that follow on from her PhD research. Her PhD examined intergenerational transmission of trauma in Holocaust survivor families. One of the key findings of this research, conducted via an international study as well as meta-analyses of the research conducted to date, was that the modes of communication used by survivors with their children regarding their experiences were hugely influential. Janine has taken this finding and expanded it to consider how people without psychological training process disclosures of varying kinds. This is anchored within the R U OK day movement which encourages community members to check in with family members, friends, and colleagues in their lives. These conversations can be quasi-therapeutic in nature and so beg the question how do people without psychological training and formal debriefing supports navigate them. Given the increasing lack of ready access to professional mental health support it is important for us to understand how the "untrained ears" in our community help those in need how best we can support them.

Janine's second research focus is around how connection with our ancestral experiences and narratives shape our identity. How much do we seek out an understanding of our blood line both culturally and in terms of the life experiences of key ancestral figures? Do we develop a sense of vicarious resilience or posttraumatic growth from coming to understand our ancestors? What factors can lead to us becoming obsessed with the search for information about our ancestors to the point of compulsion? These are questions Janine is currently seeking to answer and draws from both psychology and anthropology in this research area.