Native American Children and Youth Well-Being Indicators

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Strengths and Limitations of the ResearchStrengths• The gap in the literature regarding NativeAmerican strengths is addressed.• Forty-two Native American strengths arepresented for review and discussion withtribes and communities.• A model titled Two Views of HumanWell-Being is developed.• A model titled Three Domains of NativeAmerican Well-Being Indicators is developed.• Twenty-seven Native American strengthorientedwell-being indicators are proposed.• Examples of measurements for the assessmentof the strengths perspective aresuggested.• Native American well-being indicators arecompared and contrasted with two assetmodels: Search Institute’s 40 DevelopmentalAssets (Search Institute, 2002) and the FiveLife Domains (Bowers-Andrews & Ben-Arieh,1999).• Recommendations for future research, policy,and practice are provided.Limitations• The use of secondary analysis of documentsmay have limited the collection and analysisof American Indian/Alaska Native strengths.Primary data collection is preferred, but itwould require significant time, staff, andresources that are beyond the scope, budget,and time constraints of this project.• Analyzing 22 documents is limiting, as thereare hundreds of documents about AmericanIndians and Alaska Natives, as well as additionalsources of narrative such as interviewingindividuals, reading poems, novels,stories, and personal journals, listening tooral histories and songs, and observingrituals, and ceremonies.• Professional social work knowledge, values,and skills may have prevented the review ofthe strengths from other perspectives, thusgiving the review a professional bias.• Due to the heterogeneity of AmericanIndian/Alaska Native tribes, villages, and/orcorporations, the findings of this report do notdescribe one tribe, village, and/or corporation.The ability to generalize this report is limiteddue to the small sample size (n: 22) ofreviewed documents.42
RecommendationsResearchResearch studies provide the empirically-basedevidence for policymakers to design, modify,eliminate, and/or change policies. The resultsof research projects provide health and humanservices policymakers with data to make policiesand/or programs more efficient, timely, costeffective,and culturally relevant. Historically,research has mainly benefited researchers andnot the community itself. Native Americans arechanging this pattern by conducting researchthemselves in their own tribal communities withdirect benefits to their tribes and communities.NICWA, in cooperation with Casey FamilyPrograms, is changing this pattern to benefittribes in their own environments as demonstratedby the publication of two previous reports(Goodluck & Willeto, 2000, 2001).While there are several research methodologiesto select from, this study utilized the qualitativemethod to organize the study. The professionalliterature is only one avenue to ascertain examplesof Native American strengths forchildren and youth. The most relevant sourceof information is the people themselves in theirown natural environments. To help improve theconduct of research with tribal communities,future research-oriented projects could includethe following:• Seek out other sources of data presented inother narrative formats such as songs, shortstories, novels, poetry, and oral histories thatcan be evaluated for examples of NativeAmerican strengths.• Develop consistent definitions of termssuch as “strengths” and “well-being” that areaccepted by many tribal entities in order toensure consistent future research.• Assist tribes in designing their own researchstudies and increase the validity of thesestudies by utilizing quantitative researchmethods in addition to qualitative methods.• Considering that there are 558 tribal entitiesin the United States, it is not practical to haveevery tribe conduct research on its ownstrengths. Therefore, it is suggested thatthree to five tribes take the lead on researchingthis topic.• Facilitate tribal efforts to design and implementtribal focus groups to discuss the findingspresented in this study and to comparetheir own tribal strengths with the conceptsaddressed here.• Discuss the model proposed in this studywith tribes to determine if they are appropriateand/or applicable to that specific tribe. Some43
Page 3 and 4: ContentsAbstract 5Executive Summary
Page 8 and 9: Literature ReviewTwo major viewpoin
Page 10 and 11: increasing the well-being of all ch
Page 12 and 13: Saleebey (1997) later defined the t
Page 14 and 15: empower ourselves not to be seen as
Page 16 and 17: In another article in the same jour
Page 18 and 19: 1. Behavioral and Emotional Rating
Page 20: Proposed Model to CompareHuman Well
Page 23 and 24: FIGURE 1. Two Views of Human Well-B
Page 25 and 26: eservation, is an enrolled member o
Page 27 and 28: Discussion of SampleThe majority of
Page 29 and 30: TABLE 1. NATIVE AMERICAN STRENGTHS
Page 31 and 32: FIGURE 5. THEMES OF NATIVE AMERICAN
Page 33 and 34: the most important strengths, the r
Page 35 and 36: FIGURE 7. DOMAINS AND SUGGESTED BEH
Page 37 and 38: Comparison With Other FrameworksCom
Page 39 and 40: Comparison 2The Five Life Domains i
Page 41: Table 4 provides an analysis of the
Page 45 and 46: Policy change usually occurs after
Page 47 and 48: ConclusionThis project started beca
Page 49 and 50: Cowger, C. D. (1994). Assessing cli
Page 51 and 52: Krippendorff, K. (1980). Content an
Page 53 and 54: APPENDIX A: MATRIX WITH AUTHORS AND
Page 55 and 56: Medill, A. (2000, Fall). Reflection
Page 57 and 58: APPENDIX C: SEARCH INSTITUTE’S EX

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