Exploring Collaboration in Service Provision to Support African Immigrant Families: A Relational Action Research Study with Multicultural Health Brokers

Abstract

Collaboration is a promising practice in which front-line service providers work together to support African immigrant families who experience a family violence encounter. My dissertation is an exploration of the practice of collaboration undertaken between six multicultural health brokers and me. We explored how collaboration manifests itself in family violence service provision using a relational and collaborative co-constructed design. Underpinned by a participatory and relational constructionism worldview, our design emphasized learning about collaboration through a participatory and emergent process. Our primary mechanism to explore collaboration was a collaborative inquiry method. Our first step was to create guidelines to shape how we related to each other and how we implemented our project through this method. Our co-constructed design involved three iterative phases that collectively generated observations of how collaboration emerges between multicultural health brokers, other front-line service providers and African immigrant families. We explored collaboration by (i) exchanging and reflecting on stories of lived experience with each other, (ii) gathering and reflecting on stories of lived experience from African immigrant family members, and (iii) reflecting on case stories with other front-line service providers in a relational dialogical activity. Our reflective dialogues taught us collaboration is a co-constructed, immersive, dynamic, emergent, non-linear, contextual, and nested phenomenon. In particular, when enacting collaboration, front-line service providers can influence and impact each other and African immigrant families. As such, our findings illuminated to us how front-line service providers must be attentive to how they relate to each other and African immigrant families. I applied a complexity lens to our learnings to generate insights on how front-line service providers can better relate to other front-line service providers and African immigrant families.