Improving understandings of and responses to alcohol-related family violence for Aboriginal people

Project Details

Family violence (FV) and alcohol misuse have extremely detrimental effects on the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, contributing to a broad suite of acute and chronic physical and mental health disparities. Using mixed-methods, this research will provide substantive evidence on the associations between FV and alcohol misuse for Aboriginal populations at three field site regions across Australia: 1. East Kimberley, Western Australia; 2. South East Queensland; and 3. Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands (NPY Lands).

Multi-sited ethnographic methods including participant observation, semi-structured ethnographic interviews and focus groups, will be combined with analysis of local, state and national administrative data, to provide evidence to co-design precision public health (PPH) interventions and enhance in-place interventions at each site with our Aboriginal community partners. By incorporating cultural and social determinants of health and local priorities into the research design in collaboration with Aboriginal partner organisations with first-hand knowledge of alcohol-related family violence (ARFV) victims and their families, and linking data on family networks and local populations, the partner organisations in the three study sites will have enhanced capability to codesign robust interventions to reduce violence and overcome health inequities in vulnerable, at-risk groups.

The Indigenous public health model of emotional and social well-being will inform the project while the highly localised collaboration will address the contributing factors in their social context rather than problematising individuals caught in the spiral of violence.

Aims and hypothesis

  1. To gain insights to Aboriginal understandings of, and perspectives on, how Aboriginal people in the research settings understand and describe the relationship between FV and alcohol (alongside related risk factors and determinants of social and emotional well-being).
  2. To develop more efficient, culturally appropriate and effective interventions that reduce rates of ARFV in Indigenous communities.
  3. To determine relational patterns of service use and perpetration of ARFV at the fieldsite regions over time and space (e.g. serial perpetrators, kinship clusters, victim pathways service provision and access).

Chief Investigators

CIA - Professor Marcia Langton, University of Melbourne

CIB - Associate Professor Kristen Smith, University of Melbourne

CIC - Professor Helen Jordan, University of Melbourne

CID – Dr Andrea Clarke, University of Melbourne

Associate Investigators

Professor Sandra Eades, University of Melbourne

Professor James Ward, The University of Queensland

Professor Jody Currie, Queensland University of Technology

Ian Trust, Wunan Foundation, Kununurra

Dr Fadwa Al-Yaman, National Data Resources and Data Linkage

Partner Organisations

The Wunan Foundation

Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Community Health Service

Funding

This project was awarded approximately $1.3 million from the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Funding: $1,294,734.80

Grant identification: APP2001173