NWT RESEARCH DATABASE

Regions: Inuvialuit Settlement Region

Tags: health, well-being, food security

Objective(s): To define how residents of Ulukhaktok define "food" and "food insecurity?”

Project Description: The basic questions here are 1) How do residents of Ulukhaktok define "food" and "food insecurity?” What does it mean to be food secure? How do understandings of these concepts inform behavior? 2) How does country food consumption influence food insecurity? _Why_ is country food consumption critical for food security, health, and well-being? 3) What is the relationship between food consumption, food security, and health? There are four activities that participants might be asked to do: 1) Semi-structured interviewing focuses the cultural meanings of food, nutrition, and well-being. These are open-ended questions about what it means to eat well, what it means to be healthy, and what kinds of issues with food and health might be important to Ulukhaktomiut. The research team expects to interview 20 Inuit (10 men and 10 women) with this exercise. ). This interview is expected to last approximately one hour. With permission, interviews will be recorded. Once the interviews are transcribed, the records will be destroyed. 2) Freelisitng exercises. Freelisting is a technique used to understand cultural domains. Participants will be asked to make two lists of items. The first domain is about food, with the instructions being “please list all of your favorite foods.” The second domain is about health: “please list all of the things that make a person healthy.” 3) Pilesorting & Ranking exercise. Using the freelist data from item #2, the research team will ask respondents to sort items into three piles based on respondents’ own criteria of similarity (traditional foods, healthy foods, etc.). Once divided up, respondents will be asked to rank the items in order most healthy to least healthy, for example. 4) The Food Frequency Questionnaire is a self-report of how often the participant eats a number of commonly available foods in Ulukhaktok. 5) Food Insecurity Questionnaire: This interview will be developed from the results of 1, above. There are several standardized measures of food insecurity, but the aim of the research is to develop a Food Insecurity measure that is culturally appropriate. This will be a 10-item questionnaire asking about accessibility and availability of food that is important for Ulukhaktomiut to live a healthy life. 6) Basic noninvasive health assessments. These measurements include height, weight, hip/waist ratios to measure body mass index. Items 2-6 will involve the same 20 participants as #1, and also an additional 20 (10 men and 10 women). 2-6 are also expected to last 1 hour. In all cases, participants’ responses will be confidential. Participation is completely voluntary, and the interview/activities will be conducted in the privacy of the participant's home. This is a project with two principal goals. This summer's fieldwork is about engaging in community consultation with residents of Ulukhaktok about how to design a research project focused on food and health that employs culturally appropriate measures of food, food insecurity, and health _and_ focuses on issues that are pertinent to Ulukhaktomiut themselves. Consequently, much of the six weeks will be spent talking with people about how a larger project might look. At the same time, for purposes of project development (the target funding agency is the National Science Foundation in the US), the research team require a modest amount of pilot data that demonstrates the feasibility of the research and the design to the funding agency. The Principal Investigators will send copies of all publications/reports to the Ulukhaktok Community Corporation and to the Hamlet.The research team expect to be in Ulukhaktok in May, 2015, to discuss the results of the work done on this project. The fieldwork for this study will be conducted from June 12, 2014 to July 31, 2014.