Exploring the approaches of non-Indigenous researchers to Indigenous research: a qualitative study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Given the history of unethical research in Indigenous communities, there is often apprehension among Indigenous communities toward research carried out by non-Indigenous researchers. We examined the approaches, experiences and motivations among non-Indigenous researchers at a research-intensive Canadian university conducting research with Indigenous communities to understand approaches to ethical research with Indigenous peoples. METHODS: We performed a critical constructivist qualitative study incorporating decolonizing methodologies. We conducted semistructured interviews with 8 non-Indigenous University of Toronto researchers with a research focus/interest related to Indigenous health between August and October 2017. The interviews were transcribed and thematically analyzed through an iterative process. Shared experiences among the researchers were arranged into primary themes. RESULTS: We identified 4 primary themes related to the conduct of Indigenous research by non-Indigenous researchers: 1) relationships with communities are foundational to the research process, 2) non-Indigenous researchers experience a personal self-reflective journey grounded in reconciliation, allyship and privilege, 3) accepted knowledge frameworks in Indigenous research are familiar to most but are inconsistently applied and 4) institutions act as barriers to and facilitators of ethical conduct of Indigenous research. Four core principles - relationships, trust, humility and accountability - unified the primary themes. INTERPRETATION: We identified strengths and areas for improvement of current policies and practices in Indigenous research by non-Indigenous researchers. Although non-Indigenous researchers value relationships, and their research is informed by Indigenous knowledge, institutional barriers to implementing recommended elements exist, and certain policy statements such as the Tri-Council Policy Statement 2 lack applicability to secondary data analysis for some non-Indigenous researchers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.053 | 0.056 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".