Vital Signs 2: Paper Session 4c
Positioning, participation and authentic knowledge
Wednesday 8 September, 2 - 3.30pm
'Participation, authenticity and rhetoric: Community-based Participatory Research with an Australian Indigenous community' - Julie Mooney-Somers (University of New South Wales & University of Sydney), Anna Olsen (University of New South Wales), Robert Scott (Townsville Aboriginal and Islanders Health Service), Angie Akee (Townsville Aboriginal and Islanders Health Service) and Lisa Maher (University of New South Wales)
The raison d’être of community-based participatory research (CBPR) is to involve real people in research on issues affecting their lives. Putting this into practice is messy and complicated as CBPR - where research meets community development - is a process full of good intentions and competing priorities.
The first aim of the Indigenous Resiliency Project focused on developing the research skill and knowledge of Indigenous health service staff and Indigenous young people. The second aim was to generate knowledge to inform the development of interventions designed to prevent sexually transmitted and blood-borne infections in Indigenous young people. Prioritising capacity building, participation and collaboration created tensions for the production of knowledge.
Our research was developed and conducted by community researchers (health workers and young people who received brief training in qualitative research) and university researchers. This model of community engagement in data collection means that interview data do not always contain the depth and breadth that may have been generated by experienced researchers and such data may not meet traditional scientific notions of quality and rigour. However, the cultural expertise and experience that community researchers bring to the process suggests that project development and conduct is more likely to be culturally safe and outcomes more likely to reflect locally informed cultural perspectives.
In this paper we explore some of CBPR’s inherent tensions and interrogate how they both bolster and undermine our claims that the resulting knowledge constitutes evidence of the ‘real lives’ of Indigenous young people.