Using Participatory Methods to Engage Diverse Families in Research about Resilience in Middle Childhood.

BACKGROUND: Resilience entails drawing on resources to navigate adversity; few measures exist to explore how children cope with adversity in varying cultural contexts. PURPOSE: We aimed to develop a socially-inclusive measure of child resilience by (1) co-designing methods to engage diverse families, and (2) identifying resilience factors. METHODS: We used a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach to recruit Aboriginal families, refugee families, and families from hospital outpatient clinics. To triangulate findings and codesign methods, we held discussion groups with 21 service providers. Codesigned group-based visual methods were employed in discussion groups with 97 parents and 106 children (5-12 years). FINDINGS: Participants identified culturally-meaningful resilience factors such as loving family, speaking their home language (for families of Non-English speaking backgrounds). We discuss differences and commonalities across participant groups. CONCLUSION: Co-designing research that is both rigorous and inclusive is critical for gleaning culturally-meaningful data from diverse families.

Finding my ground in public health research: lessons from my Grandmother's kitchen.

Research has a 'bad name' in Aboriginal communities. Too often, researchers have come, gathered information and taken it away from Aboriginal people, with no benefit for the communities taking part in the research. This history has implications for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal researchers planning research with Aboriginal communities. An in depth interview study will be conducted in one region of Victoria. Participants will be Aboriginal women who have had a baby within the previous five years. Processes that have been used in preparing to 'step out' into the community to conduct this research are the focus of the paper.