Review of Decolonizing Data: Unsettling Conversations about Social Research Methods (by Jacqueline M. Quinless)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Unsettling Conversations about Social Research Methods, is a short, succinct volume that begins with the premise of examining the ways in which research practices contribute to colonization, and illustrates how social research can be part of "two-eyed seeing" (80) that incorporates Western and Indigenous values and world views.Quinless is a non-Indigenous scholar with extensive experience working with Indigenous communities.Th e fi rst chapter begins with an anecdote describing her research experiences in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, fi rst as a junior researcher with the federal government where timelines and objectives for her project were strict and clear, but she felt she was not "connected with people in the community in a meaningful way" (3).She contrasts this with a much more recent experience, also in Inuvik, that prioritized building relationships as part of the research process.From here, Quinless introduces the concepts of power, place, and relational responsibility in research design.In the most interesting part of the fi rst chapter, Quinless extensively cites Indigenous scholars in a discussion of Indigenous perspectives of well-being: in contrast to Western perspectives, the Indigenous concept of "the good life" is holistic and focuses on the balance between mental, physical, social, and emotional realms, as well as relation with the land and the water.As the author succinctly notes, "Mino-Bimaadiziwin goes well beyond income and education levels, housing and labour force activity (Newhouse & Fitzmaurice, 2012), which are how the Canadian state defi nes and measures well-being for Indigenous communities" (11).Th is contrast between Indigenous perspectives of well-being and defi cits-based health indicators emerging from Western research practices is a core theme of the book.Th e fi rst chapter introduces the Community Well-Being Index (CWB) and provides a critical examination: the CWB primarily focuses on income, education, housing, and labour force activity, neglecting crucial elements of physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional well-being.In fact, the well-being scores from the CWB
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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 | 0.233 | 0.426 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.026 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.024 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.004 |
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".