INTRODUCTION: A Samoan research methodological framework called Tafatolu (three-sides) involves the synthesis of three key parts considered as valuable to any research – a contemporary academic approach to research, a cultural approach, and the self that represents the researcher’s perspectives and positioning within the project. The rationale behind the Tafatolu methodological framework is to provide an integration of Western and Samoan perspectives to research that incorporates the cultural values and practices of the target population, as well as of the researcher.METHOD: The researcher’s doctoral study that conceptualised, articulated, and used the Tafatolu methodological framework involved the synthesis of a contemporary academic approach to research (qualitative approach), with a cultural approach (a Samoan metaphor fetu’utu’una’i muniao– manoeuvring a fisher’s rod), merged with the researcher’s own input into doingresearch (positioning as an insider/outsider researcher). Specifically, the Tafatolu methodological framework guided the researcher’s study in its methodology, methods, and the analysis of data.IMPLICATIONS: The Tafatolu methodological framework proposed and discussed in this paper provides a way to integrate western and contemporary academic approaches to research, with indigenous and cultural approaches. The fusion of its underlying concepts – a contemporary academic approach, a cultural approach, and the self – can accommodate both the context of the targeted populations under review, as well as the context of the researcher.

In Samoa, development and Christianity are pervasive and dynamic features of social life, and they are also entangled together in complex ways. This article reviews these entanglements by examining counselling as a form of pastoral practice. Counselling involves interventions that seek to facilitate, amend and restore people’s relationships. The purpose of counselling in Samoa is to provide assistance in navigating the relational space between people, or vā, in the context of ongoing dynamic change. Counselling is a useful point of entry into research on development and Christianity because both have relational effects; they are experienced in and through relationships and relational reconfigurations. Drawing on my research into counselling services by Samoan pastors, I argue that faith-based counselling should be seen as a potentially significant actor in the provision of counselling services on into the future.