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“They just don’t know”: Ideology and budget advisors’ work with precarious clients
(The University of Waikato, 2026) Hall, Ben; Jackson, Kimberly M.
Every day in Aotearoa, as in many parts of the world, budget advisors engage in one-on-one mentoring with individuals experiencing financial instability with the purpose of upskilling clients to help alleviate their precarious financial circumstances. Existing research on budget advisory practice largely focuses on measuring client outcomes and explaining variance between groups accessing budget advisory services. These services are shown to be largely ineffective in alleviating the financial instability characteristic of those experiencing precarity (ongoing economic insecurity) compared to other populations. The purpose of this thesis is to expand on previous findings by investigating how budget advisors themselves construct an understanding of their clients’ precarity, as well as how they understand their ameliorative role. This thesis contextualises budget advisors’ conceptualisations of their work and clients within broader political, economic, and ideological constructions of precarity, recognising how low and insecure incomes are structurally determined through capitalism and neoliberalism. This thesis deploys the concept of bricolage, flexibly drawing on scholarship from across the social sciences, notably including insights from community and societal psychology. Qualitative data was gathered through two semi-structured interviews conducted with each of six budget advisors, in which we discussed their work with low-income clients alongside vignettes that were presented to them for discussion. Analysis of the resulting interview transcripts drew on critical discourse analysis and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to examine how the participants constructed their role and drew on ideological assumptions within their interviews. This thesis finds that participants draw on a number of ideological constructions and assumptions to make sense of their work with precarious clients. Firstly, they present their role as that of working on correcting clients’ counterproductive mindsets, or sets of internal beliefs, that impede clients’ abilities to meet their responsibilities. Secondly, participants present their clients’ families as playing a significant role in their work, with the term ‘family’ holding a contradictory position as both an ideal for budget advisors to work towards and a reason for the breakdown of this ideal when families undermine clients’ financial goals. Thirdly, participants characterise themselves as providers of important knowledge, consequently constructing precarity as an issue that emerges from a lack of knowledge on the side of the client. These three ideas demonstrate how participants navigate their role as shaped by structural forces that maintain their clients’ financial instability and sit in an antagonistic relation to the aims of the budget advisory role. Budget advisors are shown in this thesis to displace their tacitly acknowledged inability to address the structural determinants of precarity, and instead focus on clients’ individual deficiencies, maintaining a role for themselves and their expertise. This thesis highlights some of the limitations of the participants’ budget advisory role within the current political, economic and ideological context, concluding that more emancipatory possibilities would require an incorporation of precarity’s structural determinants.
Athlete endorsement and nationality: Is there a world cup effect?
(European Advertising Academy (EAA), 2023) Desmarais, Fabrice; Calderwood, Richard; Mukherjee, Abhishek
This research considers whether attributes such as the nationality of athlete endorsers and their physical and emotional characteristics have an impact on how appealing, credible, and relevant an advertising message is to a country’s national audience. Using rugby athletes, the study assesses the impact of these attributes on respondents’ ad preference and purchasing intention across two distinct periods: during and after the rugby world cup. The results indicate that congruence of national identity between audience and endorser leads to a more positive assessment of the endorsement and a high intention to purchase by the audience across both time periods but that both ad preference and purchase intentions are higher during a mega event period.
Product type associations with hard-sell and soft-sell vocal styles: A cross cultural exploration
(European Advertising Academy (EAA), 2024) Desmarais, Fabrice; Vignolles, Alexandra; Galan, Jean-Phillippe
This study explores whether consumers’ associate hard sell and soft sell vocal styles with specific products The research, conducted across two countries (France and New Zealand), helps us understand whether these associations are universal or differ according to culture. The study shows that assessments of product-advertising vocal style fittingness are mostly consistent across countries but that cultural idiosyncrasies also need to be considered by advertisers.
Response-level identification of cloud API misconfigurations using large language models
(Scilight Press, 2026) Zahid, Farzana; Krishna, Akshay
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are a set of rules that enable communication, data exchange, and automated interactions between applications and services. With the rapid advancement of cloud computing, APIs have evolved from simple data-access interfaces into critical components for managing, configuring, and orchestrating cloud resources. Most modern cloud platforms rely on RESTful APIs for provisioning cloud resources, applying configurations, and maintaining services. As a result, APIs misconfigurations have become a critical cloud security threat that can lead to sensitive data exposure, unauthorized access, or operational disruptions. Identifying these misconfigurations is challenging because traditional rule-based and static analysis methods often fail to capture complex, context-dependent configuration issues and system behaviors. In this study, we investigate the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to detect security misconfigurations directly from cloud API response data. By treating API responses as representations of a system’s configuration state, we assess whether LLMs can effectively identify potential security risks. We evaluate five LLMs using a unified zero-shot prompting approach and compare their performance with and without Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to understand the impact of external knowledge on misconfiguration detection. The study not only focuses on each model’s ability to identify configuration components and detect misconfigurations, but also evaluates their capability to accurately determine the number of misconfigurations and generate clear, actionable security explanations. Our preliminary results show that Meta Llama Instruct combined with RAG achieves the reliable performance for identifying security misconfigurations in cloud API responses. This study provides new insights into the practicality of LLM-driven API cloud security analysis and paves the way for future research.
Most versus least: A meta-analysis of stimulus overselectivity
(The University of Waikato, 2026) Simoné; Edwards, Timothy L.
Stimulus overselectivity (OS) occurs when a person's behaviour is controlled by only a limited subset of available cues. This phenomenon is thought to contribute to learning and social challenges in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This thesis presents a multilevel meta-analysis quantifying the magnitude of OS in individuals with ASD compared to typically developing (TD) peers. Analyses of 15 studies, producing 41 unique effects, showed a statistically significant population gap (p = .036). The average level of OS was 35.16% for ASD groups and 20.96% for TD groups. Both groups exhibited a general tendency for OS, but the effect was more pronounced in ASD. Notably, this difference was fragile: when the oldest study (Gersten, 1983) was excluded, the gap was no longer statistically significant (p = .129). A major limitation was that only 15 out of 158 relevant studies provided enough data for quantitative analysis, highlighting a widespread reporting gap. These findings were consistent with stimulus control hierarchies, suggesting that the systematic narrowing of control observed in individuals with ASD may be sensitive to non-linear diagnostic shifts within the evolving diagnostic landscape. For practitioners, the findings emphasise the importance of assessing which cues guide a learner’s responses and using targeted strategies to broaden cue control in educational settings. For researchers, these results highlight the need for consistent, standardised reporting of element-level data and variability to advance theoretical understanding of overselectivity across populations.