Amplifying Cultural Values with Collaborative Photo-Elicitation: Strengths-Focused Co-Design with Alaska Native People

Focusing on deficits in research with historically marginalized communities, such as Indigenous communities, perpetuates negative stereotypes and overlooks their strengths and resilience, contributing to mistrust and epistemic injustice. Shifting to strengths-based research approaches promotes more constructive narratives, respects Indigenous knowledge systems, and aligns with ethical frameworks emphasizing Indigenous community ownership and collaboration. We use photo elicitation to investigate values for community-level health research results dissemination with Alaska Native communities, exploring online image search as a tool for collaborative photo elicitation during the co-design ideation process. Our strengths-based approach demonstrates how our methods aid in recalling cultural values during design ideation. Using a deductive qualitative approach, we examined data through lenses of resilience, socioecological strengths, and sociocultural strengths. Cultural representations of community, health and wellness, storytelling, and research are emphasized to illustrate strengths while supporting ideation. We discuss the design implications of using image search for collaborative photo elicitation and its potential for revealing cultural strengths that may otherwise be missed.