Psycho-social resilience, vulnerability and suicide prevention: impact evaluation of a mentoring approach to modify suicide risk for remote Indigenous Australian students at boarding school

Start date

2014

Research partner(s)

Queensland Government Department of Education

The proposed study was developed in response to increased suicide risk identified in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students who are compelled to attend boarding schools across Queensland when there is no secondary schooling provision in their remote home communities. It will investigate the impact of a multicomponent mentoring intervention to increase levels of psychosocial resilience. We aim to test the null hypothesis that students’ resilience is not positively influenced by the intervention. The 5-year project was funded by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council from December 2014.

Output(s)

Psycho-social resilience, vulnerability and suicide prevention: impact evaluation of a mentoring approach to modify suicide risk for remote Indigenous Australian students at boarding school

Type

Journal article

Authors

Janya McCalman, Roxanne Bainbridge, Sandra Russo, Katrina Rutherford, Komla Tsey, Mark Wenitong, Anthony Shakeshaft, Chris Doran and Susan Jacups

Publisher

BMC Public Health

Publication date

2016

Rights notice

© 2016 McCalman et al. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

File

s12889-016-2762-1.pdf

Link

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-016-2762-1

Project information

Project ownerNot listed

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Community / Language group(s)

Project contact(s)

Janya McCalman janya.mccalman@jcu.edu.au

Researcher(s)

Professor Janya McCalman
Professor Roxanne Bainbridge
Sandra Russo
Katrina Rutherford
Professor Komla Tsey
Dr Mark Wenitong
Professor Anthony Shakeshaft
Professor Chris Doran
Dr Susan Jacups

Supporting partner(s)

Complete

Start date

2014

End dateNot listed

Topic(s)

Closing the Gap focus

Funder(s)

Organisation(s)

Indigenous involvement

Indigenous involvement notes

Professor Roxanne Bainbridge is a Gunggari/Kunja woman from South-Western Queensland. She previously worked as a Professorial Research Fellow in Indigenous Health at Central Queensland University Australia; Adjunct to The Cairns Institute at James Cook University; and an inaugural Senior Atlantic Fellow for Social Equity at the University of Melbourne / the University of Oxford.

Dr Mark Wenitong is from both Kabi Kabi tribal group of South Queensland and South Sea Islander heritage, and is the director of Research Knowledge Translation at the Lowitja Institute.

This is not stand-alone investigator-driven research, but rather an excellent example of researchers responding to the needs expressed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities for effective programs to empower and promote wellbeing. The proposed study builds on extensive existing networks and research partnerships developed and supported over ten years. A strength-based participatory approach founded on social constructivism will be applied. Participatory research approaches offer opportunities for researchers and participants to produce change by working together in more equitable relationships, and this will be employed in ways that facilitate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander aspirations of autonomy, self determination and empowerment for individuals, families and communities. The investigator team has successfully collaborated using the model of Community Based Participatory Research(CBPR) espoused by Minkler and Wallerstein with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, schools, men and women’s support groups and to promote organisational change in community-controlled organisations over many years. This has established CBPR as an acceptable and feasible research approach that is highly engaging for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Psycho-social resilience, vulnerability and suicide prevention: impact evaluation of a mentoring approach to modify suicide risk for remote Indigenous Australian students at boarding school

Output(s)

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