ABSTRACT
Co-creating research is not simply a process that occurs between professional researchers and the critical population they are seeking to co-create with. It often also involves cooperative processes within the research team that ensure its integrity and accountability to the co-research partners. This chapter consists of dialogue from the perspectives of two researchers carrying out co-creation research with Māori (indigenous New Zealander) elders.
Māori elders were unconvinced that all the questions on a standard Western loneliness scale would be useful to them and lead to improved social inclusion policies and services. The researchers agreed to develop a specific older Māori loneliness scale with them. The majority of the research team was Māori. The process involved exploring with older Māori, their understanding and knowledge of the experience of loneliness and its triggers.
The dialogue takes the reader into the experience of the researchers working with Māori elders and the significant issues they raise about loneliness. These issues are then contrasted with the sort of descriptions of loneliness and its triggers assumed in Western scales. The contrast between fundamental Western assumptions around individualism, nuclear family units, and a secular society, and the assumptions of a genealogically focussed, extended family and fundamentally spiritually based society emerge with differing and overlapping understandings of loneliness and other social indicators.
The chapter explores the critical issues involved in co-creating social indicator scales and the development of pertinent research questions.
