Special Issue: Adolescent development, mental health, and promising research directions for Aboriginal youth

Like Nature, research is a slow, steady, consistent process of growth. Research involves uncovering what exists. It also involves creating knowledge to understand natural development and testing out whether there is a good explanatory fit. With the issue of child maltreatment broadly, research has shown that there are multiple causes as to why it occurs – it can be an overload of parenting stress, a mismatch in parental personality with child personality, a misunderstanding of child capacity and reasonable expectations, ineffective sanctions for not maltreating and ineffective reward mechanisms for healthful, child-rearing. For Aboriginal populations, the causation web broadens to the level of resources available to the child, family, and community, as well as the mechanism by which such resources are obtainable in a proactive, preventative orientation. With various types of intrusions into the Aboriginal life, the challenges are to create the evidence base to understand the particular issues for Aboriginal youth, the best-fit models to conceptualize the process mechanisms, and the manner in which to intervene in process and show a demonstrated improvement in target outcome, as well as a demonstrated lack of harm. It is in the careful preliminary investigation that the most efficient and ethical models can be conducted. This involves all steps of deciding what to look at, at what stage of development, who the relevant stakeholders are, how to measure the impact of research, what are the necessary safety nets and, ultimately, how to move forward from knowledge gained. The preliminary stages of looking at existing evidence to craft the research question and the pilot phase of a research project are perhaps the most time-consuming, but most cost-beneficial elements of a longer-term vision of individual, family, and community health.