Data Collection as Health Promotion: Engaging Youth, Adults and Elders in Understanding Culture and Resilience

Community-based participatory research has been gaining momentum in tribal and other communities, particularly those who have been marginalized. CBPR has overlapping goals of doing research that addresses community issues, building research capacity by engaging local people in inquiry, and moving findings into a practical realm so that communities (and societies) benefit from the knowledge produced. These goals are often hard to achieve with the differing priorities and time constraints of academic and community groups, and unequal power, resources and education levels of academics and community partners. The presentation will describe a CBPR pilot project in which the structure of data collection successfully addressed some of these challenges and promoted the method's lofty goals. The study involved young people in recruiting and interviewing adults and elders in their community about how they overcame hardship in their lives. The data collection process itself afforded participants the opportunity for culturally-appropriate intergenerational storytelling and sharing. The research focused on the ways that culture structures each generation's resilience strategies. Young co-researchers were then asked to synthesize their learning by producing digital stories about the focus of the research: cultural resilience. Some of these will be shared with the audience to illustrate the study's findings.