OBJECTIVE

The objective of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the Fostering Open eXpression among Youth (F.O.X.Y.) intervention for empowering young NWT women and facilitating dialogue about sexual health issues in the North.

RESEARCH PROPOSAL

The principal investigator intends to offer the 8-hour workshops to participants in junior high/high schools and youth centers across the NWT. The researcher will collect data by offering a short focus group with all participants at the conclusion of the workshop and then offer individual interviews with participants within 2-3 days after they complete the workshops. Afterward, the principal researcher will analyze and interpret the data and then defend the completed Ph.D. dissertation.

This is a qualitative study, which means that the principal researcher will gather words instead of numbers about the perceptions, experiences, and thoughts of young women in the NWT Each individual interview will have a short questionnaire that asks each participant their age, level of education, length of time they have spent in the NWT, living situation, employment, as well as about 4 broad questions and will take approximately one-to-two hours to complete. The focus group and interviews will be audio-taped if the participants allow the research team to do so. The tapes will be typed up word-for-word; however, all identifying information (such as names, place names, etc.) will be changed so that nobody is able to identify the participant or community to which they belong. The principal investigator will read over the typed-up transcripts and look for ideas that are similar or different between participants in order to come up with an evaluation of how effective the workshop was for the participants. Once the description is prepared, the principal researcher will contact any interested participants to have these individuals check the description for accuracy and/or help with the further interpretation of the description. 

Each workshop will have up to 10 participants. The research team will conduct the F.O.X.Y. workshops, focus groups, and interviews in communities until there is no new data resulting from the focus groups and interviews (known as "saturation of data"). It is anticipated that the workshop will be offered in about four communities before this happens. Participants will be young women between the ages of 13 to 16 who speak English and who live in the NWT. 

Young women in the NWT will have the social and educational opportunity to participate in the full-day F.O.X.Y. workshop that will be offered free-of-charge in junior high/high schools and youth centres in communities where the researcher has been invited. There are no direct economic benefits of this proposed research project to communities within the NWT, however, indirect financial benefits may include contribution of new knowledge that community members can access through the project website (www.arcticfoxy.com) and use to inform current and future health promotion policies and programs. The researcher will also provide plain language reports to all schools and youth centres involved in the project, as well as to interested health professionals, community members, and research participants.

The project website (www.arcticfoxy.com) will have detailed plain language descriptions of the research results. In addition, the principal researcher will report research findings to participants and community members through written plain language reports and will make these available at all schools and youth centres involved in the project. Radio and newspaper media across the NWT has publicized the focus testing of project materials in Spring 2012, and it is anticipated that the media will continue to transfer results to communities during the data collection phase of this project. The research team will also share research findings with the academic community through conferences and publications in scholarly journals. Research findings will become a permanent file of the University of Toronto in the form of a bound doctoral dissertation. 

The fieldwork for this study was conducted from July 12, 2013 to December 31, 2013. 

View on the Aurora Research Institute Database.

RELEVANT LINKS

• Lys, C. & Reading, C. (2012). Coming of age: How young women in the Northwest Territories understand the barriers and facilitators to positive, empowered, and safer sexual health. International Journal of Circumpolar Health, 71(1), 18957. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.3402/ijch.v71i0.18957
• Lys, C., Logie, C. H., MacNeill, N., Loppie, C., Dias, L. V., Masching, R., & Gesink, D. (2016). Arts-based HIV and STI prevention intervention with Northern and Indigenous youth in the Northwest Territories: Study protocol for a non-randomised cohort pilot study. BMJ Open, 6(10), e012399. Retrieved from http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/6/10/e012399.full.pdf 
• Logie, C. H., & Lys, C. (2015). The process of developing a community-based research agenda with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youth in the Northwest Territories, Canada. International Journal of Circumpolar Health, 74(1), 28188. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.3402/ijch.v74.28188