Mixed Methods in Indigenous Research: Building Relationships for Sustainable Intervention Outcomes
Journal of Mixed Methods Research
Published online on April 01, 2014
Abstract
Indigenous communities raise concerns that they are overresearched and tired of research always asking the same questions and reproducing the same answers, thus pressuring researchers to open the discourse on mixed methods research so as to enable new debates and approaches to emerge. A postcolonial indigenous paradigm provides a theoretical framework that informed a mixed methods research approach to design and test the efficacy of a school-based risk-reduction intervention for 14- to 17-year-old adolescents in Botswana. Indigenous methods were used to collect cultural knowledge and to build relationships; these approaches allowed for the integration of the largely marginalized knowledge systems with dominant knowledge systems through a decolonization and indigenization research process.