Exploring the health and well-being of children and youth in Winneway, Québec

Abstract

Health inequalities of Indigenous children and youth in Canada are well documented. Recently, children and youths’ perspectives are being recognized as valuable. However, there is a paucity of literature that seek children and youth’s perspective regarding their health and well-being. The purpose of this study was to understand how children and youth in Winneway, QC view health and well-being and to identify their main health and well-being concerns. A focused ethnographic study with Indigenous decolonizing framework was used with data primarily collected through interviews of fifteen participants aged 6 to 17. Children and youth in Winneway view their health and well-being as multidimensional and view themselves as decision-makers in their health and well-being choices. Their main health and well-being concerns include poor eating choices, difficulty expressing emotional and mental concerns, how children and youth treat others, and youth participation in unhealthy behaviours. These findings reveal the valuable perspectives that Indigenous children and youth can have regarding their health and well-being. They also suggest that future health and well-being interventions targeting Indigenous children and youth seek out and respect the knowledge and perspectives that children and youth have of their health and well-being.

A “Thick” Conception of Children’s Voices: A Hermeneutical Framework for Childhood Research

“…It is important to develop methods that can optimize the participation of young people in the development, implementation, analysis and interpretation, and knowledge utilization aspects of every study that involves or affects them. In most of our VOICE research, we invite young people to work with us as advisors, seeking their input on study design, participant selection procedures, adapting data generation tools (e.g., interview and observation guides), as well as data analysis, interpretation, and utilization (see, e.g., Kooiman et al, 2012;Kutcher et al, 2019;Montreuil, Thibeault, McHarg, & Carnevale, 2018;Montreuil, Thibeault, McHarg, & Carnevale, 2019;Sebti et al, 2019;Sherman et al, 2011). Most commonly, this advisory engagement has involved young people within primary school and high school, although we have sometimes consulted with younger children as young as 3 years old, adapting their forms of participation to their interests.…”

“…While conducting participant observation, we try to elicit children's expressions of their thoughts and sentiments through informal interviews (i.e., casual chatting), children's preferred expressive activities (e.g., art-making, play), and structured activities. The latter are frequently used toward the end of a study, developed in consultation with study participants (including children) as a way of exploring additional dimensions of children's experiences as well as verifying provisional data interpretations (e.g., healthy pizza-making workshop to further explore children's views on health and nutrition, performing a community play to examine children's political agency; Kooiman et al, 2012;Kutcher et al, 2019;Sherman et al, 2011).…”