Replicable Process Rather Than Replicable Content Posted on February 15, 2006 Philip A. Fisher (bio) describes Tribal Participatory Research, an approach designed to be a set of processes that can be replicated across contexts.

The other thing about developing from the ground up is that oftentimes transportability is a key factor in developing interventions. If you're going to put time and resources into developing these, then it would be nice if by the end there was potential to move it into other communities. Because these interventions tend to be very local, and I can give some examples, there is not as much a straightforward process to take the materials and use them in other contexts. The way that we've talked about this is really thinking about processes that are replicable, rather than content that's replicable.

So let me talk a little bit about the processes. The approach that we've developed is called Tribal Participatory Research, and it really is designed to be a set of processes that can be replicable from one context to another in the development of interventions. There are several mechanisms of this approach because one of the things that we found in the literature when we began to look is that there are a lot of discussions of values and principles that people should adhere to when working with American Indian communities, but not a lot of specific ideas about what you do, just practical this is how to approach it.

So the first mechanism is tribal control over the research process, and that's, if you talk to just about anybody who works in American Indian communities, people will say that's a critical issue that you need to think about. Again, because of the amount of disempowerment that's existed historically and because of the sovereign nation of tribal structures.

So tribal control consists from the start of getting approval, and again it's not that different from a lot of other community-based approaches except that you're interfacing with an official entity. We encourage people to get tribal council resolutions from the start and people working in urban Indian communities to get local community groups that can be kind of given authority to say, 'OK. Go ahead.' We encourage tribal council resolutions from before the first grant gets submitted. More and more, grant reviews are looking at the extent to which the tribe officially has agreed to participate in the project, so it's hard to get things funded without that kind of stuff.

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