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Pictures of Resilience: A PAR Photovoice Mental Health Needs Assessment with Migrant Kalaalleq Youth Living in Copenhagen

Project Overview

This project will be a participatory action research project launched in collaboration with the Greenlandic House of Copenhagen, a heritage and cultural center which also employs Greenlandic counsellors and staff to act as system navigators in guiding newly settled Greenlanders towards the appropriate social and economic resources necessary for residency in Denmark. This project is the first of its kind, and represents a new form of qualitative research which has never before been attempted with any Greenlandic Inuit population. The proposed project will look to collect and identify discrete health and well-being factors amongst Kalaalleq Greenlandic adolescents living and going to school in Copenhagen, Denmark and Nuuk, Greenland. The information collected by this project will be used to inform a needs-based assessment of the mental health resources made available to Kalaalleq Inuit youth, and suitable interventions which could be designed for use with this specific population in mind. The themes derived from the coded analysis of the photovoice data will be compared with the data produced by a quantitative survey distributed at both the Greenlandic House, and at Nunamed 2024. The quantitative survey will ask the participants a series of questions designed to determine their experience and comfort level with public health screener tools; as well as to generate information about protective factors for the mental well-being of young Kalaalleq living both inside and outside of Greenland. The possible adaptation of an instrument designed by Anishinaabe scholar , called the Aboriginal Children’s Health and Wellness Measure, will also be implicated in this study; this instrument was recently translated into Canadian Inuktitut and could serve as a valuable public health intervention for children experiencing mental health issues or who are in crisis, and is currently in varying stages of translation in at least two other Indigenous North American languages; the possible translation of this instrument into Kalaallisut will be one of the final products and considerations within this multi-method project which relies upon the active collaboration and lived experiences of Kalaalleq youth to generate and communicate ideas about “wellness” to their families and the community at large in Copenhagen, Denmark and Nuuk, Greenland.

Principal Investigator

Erin Gurr , Western University

Project Ongoing

Pictures of Resilience: A PAR Photovoice Mental Health Needs Assessment with Migrant Kalaalleq Youth Living in Copenhagen

  • Grant Type

    Capacity building grants

  • Area of research

    Mental Health

  • Disease Area

    Mental illness

  • Competition

    Doctoral Personnel Awards for Indigenous Scholars

  • Province

    Ontario

  • Start Date

    2024

  • Total Grant Amount

    $10,000