Peer-reviewed veterinary case report
Education resources in remote Australian Indigenous community dog health programs: a comparison of community and extra-community-produced resources.
- Journal:
- Health promotion international
- Year:
- 2013
- Authors:
- Constable, Sophie Elizabeth et al.
- Affiliation:
- Faculty of Veterinary Science · Australia
- Species:
- dog
Plain-English summary
In remote Indigenous communities in Australia, there has been a recent push to improve dog health through educational programs. Researchers looked at 38 resources created by local partnerships and compared them to 71 resources from outside the community. They found that the community-made resources were more visually engaging, used simpler language, and included images of people with diverse skin tones, making them more relatable. In contrast, the outside resources often used complicated language and did not address important local topics, which could make them less effective. Overall, the study suggests that resources created within the community are better suited to meet the needs of local pet owners.
Abstract
Commercial dog health programs in Australian Indigenous communities are a relatively recent occurrence. Health promotion for these programs is an even more recent development, and lacks data on effective practices. This paper analyses 38 resources created by veterinary-community partnerships in Indigenous communities, to 71 resources available through local veterinary service providers. On average, community-produced resources used significantly more of the resource area as image, more imagery as communicative rather than decorative images, larger fonts and smaller segments of text and used images of people with a range of skin tones. As well as informal registers of Standard Australian English, community-produced resources used Aboriginal English and/or Creole languages in their text, while extra-community (EC)-produced resources did not. The text of EC resources had Flesh-Kincaid reading grade levels that excluded a large proportion of community recipients. Also, they did not cover some topics of importance in communities, used academic, formal and technical language, and did not depict people of a representative range of skin tones. As such, community-produced resources were more relevant to the unique situations in remote communities, while EC resources were often inappropriate and in some cases could even distance recipients by using inappropriate language, formats and imagery.
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Search related cases →Original publication: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22552425/