Relationships is an important ethical issue in research. I believe everything is based on relationships. No matter how you are doing research, you always need good relationships that are open, mutual and goes both ways. Building relationships with those that will help you in many different ways, whether you are interviewing them or asking them for feedback, it is vital to the success for your research. In an Indigenous community, it is very important to have a relationship.
Because I'm actively involved in my community on campus, I have many different relationships from students, to faculty and staff, to even administrators. For relationships that I have already established, particularly my own Hawaiian community, I have established a relationship where I feel comfortable in sharing with them and/or talking with them about relevant things to school or life in general. For the established relationships and for those that I plan to establish, I try to base it on the concept of ʻohana. For many Indigenous peoples, ʻohana or a communal system is very important and dependent on one another to live.
These relationships, however, could impede on the study because of the concept of ʻohana. Since ʻohana is more personal and not a step away from those being interviewed or with those you are working with, it further brings the relationship closer dealing with real personal things. These are things that come with ʻohana. How to control it is another issue, that needs to be clearly thought of.
As a novice researcher and still quite unsure of many things, relationships for Indigenous peoples who are the researchers themselves have challenging issues and concerns before them. As an assistant to a current research project, we have had challenging issues in recruiting participants through gatekeepers. The gatekeepers are the key to potential participants. However, coming from the same community still has its challenges. It's the mentality of being an insider/outsider. Insider because you are from that community and know them, outsider, because of the outside influence of obtaining something.
I'm trying to analyze how we can get through gatekeepers to get the potential participants, however, we haven't had much dialogue with the gatekeepers, even if I already have an established relationship with them. As our guest speaker, Corrine Glesne shared, we need to work with the community. So how do we be more visible to them, so that we can establish a working relationship? It is what Hawaiians call "he alo a he alo," meeting face to face. So that we can physically see one another and determines one's intentions and ʻano, or character. I believe if we had more face to face meetings, we would have been able to recruit more participants in the study.
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