About our research group

Origins of the Research Group

The label Laboratório de Psicologia Ambiental, which literally translates to Environmental Research Laboratory, was first used at the Psychology Institute at the University of Brasília in 1990 as the return address of a mail survey evaluating quality of life of residential neighborhoods in Brasília. Since the term '"laboratory" has a more restrictive meaning in English, we decided to translate it to "research group" in the English version of our web pages. Since 1991 the EPRG obtained some real space in the Department of Social- and Work Psychology of the Institute.

Activities of the Research Group

That first survey in 1990 became the point of departure for a comprehensive research project which still provides the general orientation of the EPRG:

Quality of Life in Brasília: Prototypical Studies in Environmental Psychology

Brasília is our principal research site in this comprehensive research project. Based on rational urban planning, the research project is divided into topics of study: housing, transportation, work and leisure, and, additionally, landscape in Brasília and the Federal District. Orthogonally to these topics of study, we conduct conduct research of methodologies, especially about survey research techniques. One may summarize the objective of the studies developed by the EPRG as using psychology and the social sciences to understand the interaction of individuals with aspects of urban life.
Our research is based on two assumptions: (1) there is no one ideal research technique in the social sciences, each approach has advantages and disadvantages, depending on the problem under investigation; (2) the understanding of a given research problem benefits from the use of different methods and techniques. Thus, whenever possible, we use a multi-method approach which allows for convergent operations between different methods.