Mixed methods in indigenous research: Building relationships for sustainable intervention outcomes

Mixed methods using a questionnaire, interviews, talking circles and yarning.

Indigenous research paradigms centre indigenous knowledge and worldviews at the core of the research. This paradigm was combined with mixed methods to test the effectiveness of a youth, school-based, health risk reduction program in Botswana. Using an indigenous research paradigm and culturally appropriate tools brings the voice of the marginalized into the heart of the research.

The research used a relational ethics approach, meaning that those who took part in the research were seen as co-researchers. A community advisory board was also established to guide the research and to ensure that it was relevant to the needs, knowledge and values of the community. These ethics created a web of relationships based on mutual respect, harmony, collective action and accountability.

Building relationships within the indigenous community is essential for change to occur for individuals

Interview transcripts, quantitative survey questionnaires

The youth attended culturally appropriate workshops on health risk reduction, and they created individual research projects and reports for themselves and for their parents.

"A mixed methods approach that uses an indigenous research paradigm seeks to integrate multiple ways of knowing and seeing the world, multiple standpoints, and multiple values. It promotes a multidirectional lending and borrowing of knowledge systems between dominant and marginalized cultures." (p. 223)

"…indigenous paradigm is informed by a relational epistemology that values communities as knowers, and knowledge as the well-established general beliefs, concepts, and theories of any particular people that are stored in their language, practices, rituals, proverbs revered traditions, myths, and folktales." (p. 223)

Health
Research methods