Tools 2 – Community Health and Wellness Indicators Reflecting Daily Life

Co-Principal Investigators:  Bonnie Jeffery, Sylvia Abonyi

An important area of focus in health indicators research is toward better understanding local settings.  We are building on our previous work (click here to read about this work) which created a conceptual framework that reflects northern Saskatchewan Aboriginal views of health community.  

Five northern Saskatchewan communities are now interested in pursuing a more detailed study of their community health framework, applying the tool kit we developed in previous work  to ask the remaining two questions:  “How healthy is our community?” and “Why would we want to measure that?” in the three domains of:

- food security

- identity and culture

 - housing

Click here for a larger view of the poster

To answer the question "How healthy is our community?", indicator information will be compiled in community-specific data bases.  Quantitative analysis of this data will be conducted to produce health profiles for each of the five communities in the identified domain areas. 

• To answer the question "Why would we want to measure that?", we will be taking an ethnographic approach, visually and orally exploring a year in the life of the community participants in the three domain areas. 

The approach is collaborative and grounded in community identified priorities.  Community and health authority representatives on the research team see the purpose of this research as leading to their goals of providing information to the public, as well as to administrators, program planners, policy makers, and funders to identify where programs are making a positive impact as well as identify challenges and gaps.  The research also has broader theoretical and methodological applications since it is situated in an emerging global interest in understanding and tracking community health, particularly in Indigenous contexts.