What are the Aboriginal worldviews of disability in the Fitzroy Valley? Aboriginal Participatory Action Research to develop strategies for decolonising disability services
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living with disability have unequal access to health and disability support services. The impacts of colonialism and the deficit-based, Western medical model of disability have been identified as barriers to services in remote Aboriginal communities. This study explored different perceptions of disability and identified strategies to help bridge the gap between Aboriginal community members in the Fitzroy Valley and Western health and disability support services. DESIGN: Aboriginal Participatory Action Research approach with in-depth interviews. Transcripts were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Preliminary results were presented to community representatives for contextualisation, validation and to co-design recommendations. SETTING: Fitzroy Valley in the Kimberley region, Western Australia. PARTICIPANTS: Aboriginal community members with lived experience of disability (n=7) and health and disability support service providers (n=12). RESULTS: Eight themes were identified: (1) Aboriginal kinship systems are a community strength and support for people living with disability; (2) Aboriginal people from the Fitzroy Valley perceive disability as a social construct; (3) Western medical model of disability differs from Aboriginal perceptions of disability; (4) Aboriginal people from the Fitzroy Valley perceive different types of disabilities in various ways; (5) good awareness of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder in the Fitzroy Valley, but more education is wanted; (6) focus on functional needs and supports for disability; (7) barriers to disability services and (8) decolonise disability services. Community co-designed recommendations focus on centring the Aboriginal worldviews of disability in the Fitzroy Valley. CONCLUSIONS: Decolonising disability services is needed to improve access for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. This should involve adapting the current Western medical model of services to enable strengths-based diagnostic and support services that align with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kinship systems, cultures and ways of being. Community leadership must play a central role in this shift.
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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 | 0.016 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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".