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Talanoa research methodology: A developing position on Pacific research
Abstract
Talanoa Research Methodology (TRM) contributes to the theorising on Pacific research from a personal and Tongan perspectives. The majority of the thinking and concepts discussed seek to provide a space for Pacific perspectives (as legitimated) in research. It shares similarities with other localised critical research approaches. TRM discusses what constitutes ‘normality’ in research approaches and theorises on appropriate approaches to researching Pacific educational and social issues and the influence Pacific indigenous values have on the way Pacific peoples in New Zealand see and communicate their worlds.
Supplementary resource (1)
... The next three sections of this article story Kiribati and Tuvaluan experiences of climate mobility with(out) dignity. First, we outline our research strategy, detailing our multi-layered methodology which grounds communitylevel analysis (Fernandes-Jesus et al., 2020) in the talanoa methodology (Vaioleti, 2006). Next, we introduce the vaka or wa model of mobility, based on a series of open group discussions (Sautalaga, Tuvalu; Maroro, Kiribati) with members of the Kiribati and Tuvaluan communities in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. ...
... Although the term 'community' is critiqued for assuming homogeneity and fixed boundaries (Titz et al., 2018), we refer to the Kiribati and Tuvaluan groups as 'communities' to reflect how they label themselves. Our multi-ethnic (Palagi [New Zealander of European descent], Māori [Uenukukōpako, Ngāti Pikiao], Cook Island Māori; German) research team (all also authors) pair the talanoa methodology (Vaioleti, 2006) with critical community psychology (CCP, Evans et al., 2017) for a contextualised, culturally relevant and justice-oriented view of mobility. Talanoa, meaning a flexible, empathetic conversation, is a deeply emotional and intersubjective methodology with embedded Pacific values (Farrelly & Nabobo-Baba, 2014;Vaioleti, 2006). ...
... Our multi-ethnic (Palagi [New Zealander of European descent], Māori [Uenukukōpako, Ngāti Pikiao], Cook Island Māori; German) research team (all also authors) pair the talanoa methodology (Vaioleti, 2006) with critical community psychology (CCP, Evans et al., 2017) for a contextualised, culturally relevant and justice-oriented view of mobility. Talanoa, meaning a flexible, empathetic conversation, is a deeply emotional and intersubjective methodology with embedded Pacific values (Farrelly & Nabobo-Baba, 2014;Vaioleti, 2006). Talanoa co-constructs knowledge that legitimates Pacific metaphysical realities as socially, spiritually, politically and historically situated and seeks transformative change for Pacific peoples (Anae, 2010;Farrelly & Nabobo-Baba, 2014;Tualaulelei & McFall-Mccaffery, 2019). ...
Background and aims:
Many Pacific people are considering cross-border mobility in response to the climate crisis, despite exclusion from international protection frameworks. The 'Migration with dignity' concept facilitates immigration within existing laws but without host government support. Through the metaphor of Pacific navigation, we explore the role of dignity in the lives of I-Kiribati and Tuvaluans in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Methods:
Combining talanoa (pacific research method) with I-Kiribati and Tuvaluan community members, alongside critical community psychology and thematic analysis, we depict climate mobility as a wa or vaka moana (ocean-going canoes) journey.
Analysis:
Participants are expert navigators, navigating immigration obstacles to (re)grow their roots in Aotearoa New Zealand before charting a course for future generations to thrive. They draw strength from culture and community to overcome the adversity of precarious living and visa non-recognition.
Conclusion:
Reconceptualising climate mobility through a Pacific lens imagines both dignity and cultural preservation as possible, despite the indignities and limitations of socio-political systems and protections for climate migrants.
... It literally means "talking about nothing in particular" but also encompasses "the ancient practice of multilevel and multilayered critical discussions" (Vaioleti 2006, 23-24). The use of this method in ethnography, and in other academic data gathering, has recurringly been discussed (Fa'avae, Tecun, and Siu'ulua 2021;Tecun et al. 2018;Farrelly and Nabobo-Baba 2014;Vaioleti 2006). "Story telling" as Indigenous research method had already been proposed by Smith (1999, 144). ...
In Oceania, as elsewhere, power relations in knowledge production have been highly debated for many decades. Oceanian anthropologists have developed challenging proposals to decolonise anthropology and academia in Oceania at large. Nevertheless, insights from this region do not figure prominently in recent theoretical discussions about coloniality and decolonisation “about the subaltern” (Grosfoguel 2007, 211). By focusing on the long-lasting Oceanian discourse in a Swiss peer-reviewed journal, this article aims to contribute to the decolonisation of Swiss academia by proposing an anthropology “with and from a subaltern perspective” (Grosfoguel 2007, 211). Drawing on recent online research, and experiences with teaching the anthropology of Oceania, this article familiarises a European readership with Indigenous anthropologists from Oceania, and their struggles with our discipline. It looks at Indigenous scholars’ reflections about and propositions for different ways of knowledge production and Indigenous research methods. The article concludes with suggestions to further the decolonisation process within (Swiss) academia.
... As a concept, talanoa can be separated into two parts. 'Tala' is to do with story or stories and 'noa' is to do with ordinary, something unknown, or nothing (Suaalii-Sauni & Fulu-Aiolupotea, 2014;Vaioleti, 2006). Talanoa as a cultural practice in Samoa means to story, to tell, to talk, or to discuss. ...
The paper is a leadership talanoa by a primary school principal of Samoan and Palagi heritages. The context of my talanoa is a descriptive account of my intentional practices, stories of my lived experiences, and contextual learnings aimed to shift school practices and structures so that Pasifika students succeed as Pasifika, a point clearly noted in the Tapasā policy. To prioritise the success of diverse ākonga in South Auckland, knowing and learning to work outside of the confines of school systems and governance processes within Aotearoa New Zealand schooling supported my work as a school principal and critical change agent. I write this paper using talanoa, the cultural practice of storying by (re)telling my leadership reflections and ako views as a Pasifika school leader. Talanoa and vā have been useful in my intentional practices.
... This scoping review reflects ethical principles of facilitating research in a Pacific setting, including respect for relationships, cultural protocols and processes, 44 reciprocity 45-47 and a holistic approach. 48 49 The research team comprises researchers from Solomon Islands, and researchers from Australia who have almost three decades of experience of living and working in the Pacific. ...
Introduction
Menopause denotes the end of a woman’s reproductive life. A woman’s experiences of menopause are shaped by her individual circumstances and may vary between social and cultural contexts. Evidence is needed to inform research and programme delivery that supports women’s health and well-being throughout the menopausal transition. This scoping review will map evidence of women’s experiences of menopause in Asia Pacific countries, where limited research exists.
Methods and analysis
We will follow the five-stage framework of Arksey and O’Malley, further developed by Levac et al and the Joanna Briggs Institute. MEDLINE, CINAHL, PsycINFO and Scopus databases will be systematically searched between February 2022 and May 2022 using subject headings and keywords. The title–abstract and full text of retrieved studies will be assessed against eligibility criteria. The review will focus on studies with a qualitative research component. Citation searching of selected articles will supplement database searching. Data will be extracted, charted, synthesised and summarised. Findings will be presented in narrative format and implications for research and practice reported.
Ethics and dissemination
Ethical approval is not required for this scoping review of selected studies from peer-reviewed journals. Ethical approval has been granted from relevant ethics committees for community consultation. Findings will be shared in peer-reviewed publications, presented at conferences and disseminated with communities, health workers and researchers.
... Interview questions and style were iteratively adapted as data collection progressed, incorporating a conversational technique recommended for Pacific research. 19 Recorded interviews were transcribed, de-identified and made available to participants for their review. Whole individual interview transcripts, and interview data organised per topic response were imported into NVivo (NVivo 12plus; QSR International Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Australia) for coding and analysis. ...
Objective
We sought to explore the activities, responsibilities and experience of leadership from Pacific emergency medicine (EM) doctors. Additionally, we explored knowledge, attitudes, leadership gaps and training insights for individual clinicians, and from a Pacific regional perspective.
Methods
This was a qualitative study using in-depth, semi-structured interviews of invited Pacific EM doctors occupying a leadership role in their countries. Data were recorded, transcribed and triangulated with written field notes. Whole interviews and responses per topic were analysed using data-platform-based and manual methods. Inductive and deductive coding and thematic content analysis was performed in partnership with Pacific co-researchers to determine overall meaning. Monash University granted ethics approval.
Results
Twelve doctors participated (11 verbal, one written response), representing six different Pacific Island countries. Four key themes were identified which reflected both the individual agency of the Pacific EM doctors and how their experience was constituted by others; professional identity and style; nurturing relationships and building solidarity; growth through experience, education and challenge; and progress and precarity. Pacific EM leaders perform clinical, management, advocacy and education tasks, and build their capacity and resilience through leadership training. They have a strong desire for regional solidarity and networking.
Conclusions
Pacific EM doctors embrace leadership in their home countries and collaborate to drive positive change, build teams and gain recognition. As pioneers and advocates for EM, they bear high responsibility and risk burnout. These findings can inform future targeted leadership training and contribute to building Pacific regional networks for career sustainability and specialty advancement.
This study examines indigenous Fijian and Papua New Guinean enterprises on customary land. It explores the duality of merging indigenous and Western principles of entrepreneurship and the ability to balance business and socio‐cultural imperatives. A qualitative, ethnographic‐case study approach is deployed, with talanoa/tok stori used to collect empirical materials. Two interrelated themes emerged from the study: The need for indigenous enterprise models to contribute to a more holistic conception of well‐being, and as a result, the requirement to rethink how surplus is distributed beyond mainstream shareholder ownership models. This study reveals a more nuanced approach to distributing surplus based on indigenous conceptions of kinship. The specific theoretical contribution of this study is an indigenous conception of surplus distribution that offers a challenge to traditional shareholder models.
This article explores how journalists navigate the tensions between community engagement and professional detachment by tracing how journalists used Twitter during Tonga and Australia's inaugural rugby league test match in 2018. As a high-profile Pacific cultural and sporting event, it provides an opportunity to study how journalists engage with marginalised Pacific communities, and whether that engagement demonstrates the reciprocity needed to build relationships. More than 9000 tweets were analysed using quantitative and qualitative methods to reveal that media organisations and journalists tended more towards broadcasting than interactive approaches on Twitter. Practices differed between subgroups, however: Individual journalists engaged in public discussion more than media organisations, and Pacific journalists engaged more than non-Pacific journalists. In fact, Pacific journalists’ identity work – performed through specific discourses, including emojis – demonstrated a less detached journalism than did non-Pacific journalists, who appeared to talk past the Pacific communities in this Twitter public.
Crucial to the success of Pacific learners is the engagement of schools with the learners’ families and their communities. This article reports on a small-scale study which focussed on home–school relationships for Pacific secondary learners in Aotearoa New Zealand. It explored good practice and further considered how schools might develop their home–school practices to better support Pacific students. An Appreciative Inquiry (AI) lens supported this strength-based approach. AI promotes positive change through the inclusion of multiple voices. This article argues that AI is a tool which schools could use to review and develop their home–school relationships with Pacific families and, in so doing, bring about structural changes that promote successful learning experiences for Pacific students.
Institutional structures of Australian universities are increasingly characterised by unsustainable practices of accelerated time and work intensification. This chapter aims to locate and analyse what a collective ‘ethics of care’ might look like as a response to these practices. It does this by narrating micro-stories of the embodied social practices of women-academic workers, drawing on experiences of time spent at an off-site group retreat. The stories within the chapter are carried by Indigenous Fijian talanoa ways of knowing and critical autoethnography. The use of talanoa brings a relationality to ‘self-care’, shifting it away from the individual experience towards a more collective movement. Doing this helps to recapture the pleasure and purpose that characterises ‘timeless time’, thereby positively influencing everyday cultures of practice in higher education.
Indigenous knowledge is generally understood to be knowledge developed by a particular group in their specific environment over an extended period of time. In academia generally, bodies of knowledge of differing origins are not often understood. This article employs ontology as a ground for developing relational clarity in the academy by considering two oral traditions—talanoa (a Polynesian conversational form) as represented in research and Melanesian tok stori (a Melanesian form of discursive group communication) understood through an Indigenous Solomon Islands ontology. The discussion of tok stori offers a window into the complex ontological thinking required of the academy when seeking to learn from the knowledge of Mala’ita Solomon Islands specifically, and from Indigenous groups generally. The value to the wider research community suggests that bringing research back home through approaches constructed on the way people act can capitalise on the logic of aligning ontology and practice in research.
Restricted Item. Print thesis available in the University of Auckland Library or may be available through Inter-Library Loan. Restricted Item. Print thesis available in the University of Auckland Library or may be available through Inter-Library Loan. This study addresses the complex issue of the 'achievement' of Tongan students in secondary schooling in Aotearoa New Zealand. It argues that the current model of 'Pacific Islands Education' underpinning attempts to assist Tongan students in fact fails to inform practices that could transform their experiences of underachievement in secondary schooling. Rather, I maintain, the popular notion of 'Pacific Islands Education' paradoxically serves to perpetuate the marginalisation of Tongan students and maintain the status quo. As a critique of 'Pacific Islands Education', the thesis draws upon Tongan knowledge of good pedagogical ideas. This ideas are drawn from a critical exploration of two Tongan community-based learning contexts enacted 'within' the formal secondary school system in Auckland, namely the Katoanga Faiva (the ASB Bank Maori and Pacific Island Secondary Schools Cultural Festival) and the Po Ako (Homework Centre project). I argue that malie and mafana, notions that are explored in the thesis as constitutive of good social relationships, are the key to good pedagogy and learning in both of these sites-the only place where substantial numbers of Tongan parents and young people actively and enthusiastically engage with the school. Malie and mafana offer a useful Tongan theoretical framework in which 'achievement' in the broader context of the school can be analysed and reconfigured. As well as recognising the real strengths of, and insights offered by, the two Tongan pedagogical sites, this thesis addresses dangers in both Tongan community and mainstream enthusiasm for these initiatives. I argue that an exclusive focus on skilled, malie-filled 'performance' separated from an analysis of the social, political, and economic positioning of Tongans within New Zealand, merely serves, ultimately, to reproduce the marginalization of Tongan (and other 'Pacific') people in the New Zealand schooling system.
I found Martin Orans's review ( Science 's Compass, 12 Mar., p. [1649][1]) of my book The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research (Westview, Boulder, CO, 1998) partisan in the extreme.
In her letter of 15 February 1926 to her supervisor, Franz Boas, Margaret
Presents some of the leading assumptions and methodological principles of qualitative approaches to research as a preface to conducting and using research on college student behavior and development. This is accomplished first by presenting and comparing important philosophical and methodological differences between the qualitative approaches. The differences between the 2 approaches are presented in terms of their ontological and epistemological assumptions, research goals, and methods of data collection and analysis. Ideas from phenomenology are used to argue that naturally occurring, organized occasions of social interaction are fruitful settings for the investigation of questions relevant to the behavior of college students. Two studies conducted in the qualitative mode, one using focused interview data and the other using ethnomethodological and conversational analytic methods, are summarized. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This book by the assistant curator of ethnology in the American Museum of Natural History is based upon a nine months' study of adolescent and near-adolescent girls living in three villages on the west coast of Tāu in the Manu'a Archipelago. The chief problem which the author put herself was this: "Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilization?" The Samoan adolescent girl is markedly free from conflicts as a result of many factors, among which the following may be listed: (1) the type of family organization, which enables the child to escape from over-strict discipline in any one group; (2) the free experimentation in sexual activities which is permitted; (3) the wide acquaintance with problems of life and death which the child gets in observing birth, miscarriage, intercourse, and Caesarian operations; (4) the disinclination to pry into motives; (5) the recognition of the essential impersonality of sex attraction; and (6) "the general educational concept which disapproves of precocity and coddles the slow, the laggard, the inept." The material of the book is organized under the following chief topics: the education of the Samoan child; the Samoan household; the girl and her age group; the girl in the community; formal sex relations; the rôle of the dance; the attitude towards personality; the experience and individuality of the average girl; the girl in conflict; maturity and old age; and educational implications. The appendix supplies certain technical details, particularly on the use of intelligence tests in the Samoan language. A foreword to the book has been written by Franz Boas. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Collaborative research stories -Whakawhanaungatanga
- R Bishop
Bishop, R. (1996). Collaborative research stories -Whakawhanaungatanga.
Palmerston North: Dunmore Press.