Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

A growing number of researchers are utilising Indigenous methodologies in their land-based research, highlighting the richness of Indigenous knowledge and the ways in which it can contribute to research that enhances Indigenous well-being. Despite the popularity of these methodologies, researchers often apply Western standards of rigour (i.e. the concepts of reliability, validity, and generalisability) that are not necessarily congruent with Indigenous understandings of knowledge as relationship-based. However, there is a dearth of literature available on possible criteria for rigour that are derived from Indigenous ways of knowing. Thus, the purpose of this study is to identify quality criteria from Indigenous peoples who work within an Indigenous research paradigm that may be used to refine and evaluate a culturally relevant physical activity environment assessment tool for Indigenous communities. In order to determine appropriate criteria, Indigenous Elders, scholars, and community members from different disciplines and regions of Turtle Island were invited to participate in the interviews on this topic. Following a participatory thematic analysis, the concepts of relational accountability, based on an understanding that everyone must speak the truth in order to maintain relational balance with one another, and authenticity, or the degree to which the tool remains true to the personal experiences of the co-researchers involved in its creation, were seen as important criteria for evaluating the quality of a physical activity environment assessment tool for Indigenous communities. This study contributes to the growing body of research that demonstrates the value that incorporating Indigenous ways of knowing can have for creating a more wholistic understanding of the physical activity environment. Once evaluated using this criteria, the physical activity environment assessment tool can be used to determine strengths of the community physical activity environment.