Research With Tribal Communities and Peoples: Progress, Challenges and Looking to the Future

Excerpt

The decision of the editorial team of the Journal of Primary Prevention to develop this special double issue came about while we were in a meeting debating whether a recently submitted manuscript should go out for review. In these weekly meetings, our team considers the quality of the research of each newly submitted manuscript as well as the relevance and appeal of its topic to our many audiences. When it comes to high quality prevention research with diverse ethnic populations, there is a definite dearth and this is particularly true of studies relating to Native American populations. There are many legitimate (and probably some non-legitimate) reasons for this, of course, but it means that prevention providers and public health professionals working with Tribal communities often lack strong scientific evidence to support or inform their work, and thus find themselves without the means to guide, justify and support their decisions. …