Doctors Reform Society of Australia
			supporting health care reforms to ensure justice, equity and quality care for all
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by Joan Winch and Ken Hayward

Getting our voices across

Older traditions of the University system encompasses the Positivistic Science which was thought to cover and provide ‘The Ultimate Truth’. Now it can be seen that there is no single truth and that people provide ‘the truth’ from their own knowledge and understanding. The scientist took the role as independent observer with the knower and the known considered as separate entities. This was the science which was thought to solve all problems and based on the assumption that the behaviour of people is the same as that of matter and that causation is linear (Capra 1982). The opposite is true within the Aboriginal communities. This was also expressed by Kwagley (1995), a Yupiaq native from Alaska, where he said that quantity data, standard deviations and correlations and the like are meaningless and we need to redefine the way research is done using our terms of reference.

Anthropologists described reality from their own perspectives and history which was then classified by university standards as ‘the truth’. The only people who are able to describe within context are the ones who have the lived experience of those being researched.

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			This page was last updated on 10th February, 2003.
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