Invited Commentary on “Combatting neo-Colonialism in Health Research: What can Aboriginal Health Research Ethics and Global Health Research Ethics Teach Each Other?”

Abstract

Bridget Pratt and Adrian Harper ( 2021) conducted a comparison of articles identified through six electronic literature searches. Their aim was to “identify ethics literature… that discussed combatting neo-colonial models of research”. They used manifest content analysis to compare the conceptual content of articles from the fields of global health (GH) and Australian Aboriginal health (AH). This innovative application of a literature review approach from literary and media studies, to health sciences in which literature reviews have traditionally focused on synthesizing evidence about intervention effectiveness, should be commended. It has potential to advance theoretical understandings of ethics in health research. However, I argue here that Pratt and Harper’s (2021) search strategy has several weaknesses, which suggests that their results must be interpreted with caution.

Keywords

literature review design research ethics theory neo-colonialism global health Aboriginal health

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