Locating Empowerment in the Context of Indigenous Australia

Whiteside, Mary; Tsey, Komla; Earles, Wendy

doi:10.1080/0312407x.2010.533279

Cited by 27 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Our findings support an existing model demonstrating the importance of building empowerment based on cultural and spiritual beliefs, to improve wellbeing for Indigenous Australians [49, 50]. Our measures of empowerment are based on self-reported resilience, self-efficacy and identity.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 81%

Interplay wellbeing framework: a collaborative methodology ‘bringing together stories and numbers’ to quantify Aboriginal cultural values in remote Australia

Cairney

Abbott

Quinn

et al. 2017

Int J Equity Health

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BackgroundWellbeing has been difficult to understand, measure and strengthen for Aboriginal people in remote Australia. Part of the challenge has been genuinely involving community members and incorporating their values and priorities into assessment and policy. Taking a ‘shared space’ collaborative approach between remote Aboriginal communities, governments and scientists, we merged Aboriginal knowledge with western science – by bringing together stories and numbers. This research aims to statistically validate the holistic Interplay Wellbeing Framework and Survey that bring together Aboriginal-identified priorities of culture, empowerment and community with government priorities including education, employment and health.MethodQuantitative survey data were collected from a cohort of 842 Aboriginal people aged 15-34 years, recruited from four different Aboriginal communities in remote Australia. Aboriginal community researchers designed and administered the survey.ResultsStructural equation modeling showed good fit statistics (χ/df = 2.69, CFI = 0.95 and RMSEA = 0.045) confirming the holistic nature of the Interplay Wellbeing Framework. The strongest direct impacts on wellbeing were ‘social and emotional wellbeing’ (r = 0.23; p < 0.001), ‘English literacy and numeracy’ (r = 0.15; p < 0.001), ‘Aboriginal literacy’ (r = 0.14; p < 0.001), ‘substances’ (lack thereof; r = 0.13; p = 0.003), ‘work’ (r = 0.12; p = 0.02) and ‘community’ (r = 0.08; p = 0.05). Correlation analyses suggested cultural factors have indirect impacts on wellbeing, such as through Aboriginal literacy. All cultural variables correlated highly with each other, and with empowerment and community. Empowerment also correlated highly with all education and work variables. ‘Substances’ (lack thereof) was linked with positive outcomes across culture, education and work. Specific interrelationships will be explored in detail separately.ConclusionThe Interplay Wellbeing Framework and Survey were statistically validated as a collaborative approach to assessing wellbeing that is inclusive of other cultural worldviews, values and practices. New community-derived social and cultural indicators were established, contributing valuable insight to psychometric assessment across cultures. These analyses confirm that culture, empowerment and community play key roles in the interplay with education, employment and health, as part of a holistic and quantifiable system of wellbeing. This research supports the holistic concept of wellbeing confirming that everything is interrelated and needs to be considered at the ‘whole of system’ level in policy approaches.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 81%

Interplay wellbeing framework: a collaborative methodology ‘bringing together stories and numbers’ to quantify Aboriginal cultural values in remote Australia

Cairney

Abbott

Quinn

et al. 2017

Int J Equity Health

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As a concept, empowerment lacks an overarching theoretical framework across the disciplines (Whiteside, Tsey, & Earles, 2011), leading to confusion about its purpose. Is it the transformation of a business organization, or the gaining and mobilization of social and political power?…”

Section: Empowerment As a Modeled Strategymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is therefore useful to define empowerment as a multi-level construct that involves people assuming control and mastery over their lives in the context of their social and political environment; they gain a sense of control and purposefulness as they participate in the democratic life of their community for social change. (Wallerstein, 1992, p. 198, as cited in Whiteside et al, 2011) A significant background influence on the structure of the community development training was the empowerment model embedded within the Family Wellbeing Empowerment Program (FWB). The FWB was designed to enhance the capacity of Indigenous Australians to more effectively address the social determinants of their health.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Australian Indigenous community development: making the link between community development training and community development practice

Stephens

Baird²,

Tsey

2013

Community Development

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There is little written about the link between community development training and community development practice in the context of Australian Indigenous community development. Wontulp Bi-Buya College (WBBC), in Queensland, Australia, is a training organization providing explicit training in community development to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders. A framework for understanding the complex nature of community development training and its impact on Indigenous community development is theorized through the lenses of (1) empowerment as a modeled strategy, (2) pedagogy, and (3) the importance of social capital ties, through the work being delivered at WBBC. Insights from this work have an important bearing on actions needed to achieve the Australian "Close the Gap" policy on Indigenous disadvantage, and in particular, appropriate program monitoring and evaluation frameworks used to assess interventions.

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“…Make contributions of local, national, and international significance to the knowledge of evidence based approaches that engage and support individuals and groups to take greater control and responsibility for their health and wellbeing literature (Whiteside, Tsey, & Earles, 2011). This became an important dataset, not only due to the richness of the data but also because of the extent to which it addressed all of the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) (2003) criteria for health and medical research of Indigenous Australians of community engagement, benefit, sustainability and transferability, building capacity, priority, and significance (NHMRC, 2003;Whiteside et al, 2011). …”

Section: The Empowerment Research Programmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But once ''there'', she found she liked it and felt good about herself. Increasingly, she saw herself as someone with the capacity to help and lead others (Whiteside, 2009).…”

Section: The Empowerment Research Programmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using Secondary Data for Grounded Theory Analysis

Whiteside

Mills

McCalman

2012

Australian Social Work

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Grounded theory is well utilised in qualitative research for building theoretical understanding of complex social processes. Grounded theory data analysis strategies can be used with different types of data, including secondary data. Despite the potential advantages of secondary data, it is rarely used for grounded theory studies, largely due to a perception that researchers are unable to follow the guidelines of this research design with data that they themselves have not collected. This paper demonstrates the use of secondary data in a study investigating the substantive area of Indigenous empowerment. Potential pitfalls and advantages of using grounded theory methods to analyse secondary data are discussed, as well as factors that facilitated the analytic process in this study. These factors included having a large data set across multiple sites and the use of literature as a source of data. The findings provide a valuable model for combining research and practise.

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Locating Empowerment in the Context of Indigenous Australia

Cited by 27 publications

References 24 publications

Interplay wellbeing framework: a collaborative methodology ‘bringing together stories and numbers’ to quantify Aboriginal cultural values in remote Australia

Interplay wellbeing framework: a collaborative methodology ‘bringing together stories and numbers’ to quantify Aboriginal cultural values in remote Australia

Australian Indigenous community development: making the link between community development training and community development practice

Using Secondary Data for Grounded Theory Analysis

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