Fire and Smoke: Using Indigenous Research Methodologies to Explore the Psychosocial Impact of Pediatric Burns on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Families

Abstract

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and adolescents are disproportionately affected by burn injuries, yet often omitted from burns literature or inadequately portrayed under Western frameworks. We highlight and address the urgent need for knowledge about pediatric burns among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to be produced from within Indigenous research methodologies and in response to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ expressed needs. Through the use of decolonial ethnography, we applied a novel combination of participant observations, retrospective thinking aloud, and yarning methods to explore the psychosocial impact of pediatric burn injuries and care on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families. To our knowledge, this is the first example of these three methods being interwoven to explore a multifaceted health issue and in a way that privileges Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' knowledge systems, voices, and experiences. We suggest that these approaches have strong relevance and potential for other complex issues affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Digital Support for Indigenous Research Methodologies

“…The past two decades has witnessed an emergence of a body of scholarship that is led by Indigenous scholars from Canada, the United States of America, Australia and New Zealand and elsewhere. This has established a distinct Indigenous research paradigm (Wilson, 1998;Bessarab & Ng'andu, 2010;Denzin & Lincoln, 2008;Martin, 2003;Smith, 2012;Walter & Moreton-Robinson, 2010;Williams et al, 2021). In her seminal work, Decolonising Methodologies, Maori academic Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Smith 2012) identifies the negative history associated with research and harmful impacts that Indigenous Peoples have experienced since colonisation.…”