NWT RESEARCH DATABASE

Regions: Inuvialuit Settlement Region

Tags: health, social sciences, education, smoking

Objective(s): To empower local Inuvialuit community members to better understand tobacco and its health and other effects (e.g. high costs of tobacco affects family budgets), and to motivate them to consider quitting or reducing their use of tobacco.

Project Description: This research aims to empower local Inuvialuit community members to better understand tobacco and its health and other effects (e.g. high costs of tobacco affects family budgets), and to motivate them to consider quitting or reducing their use of tobacco. As well, it aims to reach young children and youth before they start smoking, and to spread the message that smoking is not “cool”. Our method of training local people to co-ordinate and conduct the educational and research aspects of the work is unique to the approach of community-based participatory research (CBPR) that we are using. CBPR consists essentially of collective research, education and action. There is no “research for research’s sake” and all research should be used to guide community education and/or action to improve the situation that was researched in the first place. In this project, the team began by recruiting and training adult CBPR team coordinators in each community. They then selected and helped train youth CBPR team members. These local teams then assisted with conducting a 4-page baseline survey, recruiting people to enter a Quit to Win Challenge, organizing educational sessions in the schools, etc. Keeping the focus on local teams and their interactions with community members is the hallmark of CBPR. The research team has trained and oriented a local team coordinator in each community (Aklavik and Ulukhaktok) who works with youth to implement various phases of the project. Local team coordinators are responsible for feeding back information to the communities, via posters, community gatherings, local radio shows, and sharing of project Updates. The national team assists with preparation of graphs and illustrated handouts etc. to facilitate this task. In addition, the researchers send press releases to regional newspapers etc. when there is a major community initiative. The fieldwork for this study will be conducted from March 30, 2012 to December 31, 2012.