Addressing Violence Towards Youth and Young Adults in Indigenous Communities: A Tribal-Research Partnership, United States, 2022-2023 (ICPSR 39178)
Through a new tribal program and researcher partnership, this study aimed to answer the questions: what does violence look like to Native youth, and how do Native youth experience resilience and how can that resilience be strengthened? Through the use of two theoretical frameworks, Galtung's Basic Human Needs and the Socio-Ecological model, these questions were explored.
The work from this project was threefold, first this was a capacity-building grant. Therefore, the central goal was to establish a new tribal program partnership between Native Women's Society of the Great Plains (NWS), led by researchers from the University of South Dakota (USD) and researchers from the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS). Together they worked to identify additional members who would be part of the study design, implementation, analysis, and dissemination. Project partners ranged in age and geographic location. Participants from NWS, USD, and UCCS worked collaboratively to meet the additional goals of this project.
The second goal was to explore an issue of concern to NWS across the Great Plains Region using the community based participatory research approach. From previous discussions between the researchers and NWS team, vulnerability to violence begins in youth, and therefore was of particular interest to Native people of the Great Plains Region. Thus, USD, NSW, and UCCS developed and applied for the Tribal-Research Capacity-Building Grant together.
The third goal was to identify a priority matter from the data collected on this project and collaborate on a subsequent grant application.
To meet these three overarching goals, five objectives were mapped out for this project. These included the following:
- Objective 1: Develop a communication strategy among the partnership agency members to advance capacity and enable meaningful conversations about difficult topics.
- Objective 2: Develop an answer to the question "what is violence?" for this population.
- Objective 3: To understand how these different sources of violence interact with the human needs identified under objective 2 to create patterned vulnerabilities (or susceptibilities).
- Objective 4: To address how resilience works within the developed model.
- Objective 5: To extend capacity building in the broader Indigenous communities of the Great Plains through bidirectional communication and information sharing.