Academic Marginalization? the Journalistic Response to Social Work Research on Native Hawaiian Youths

Mokuau, Garlock-Tuiali'i, and Lee (2008) recently conducted a review of studies that focused on Native Hawaiians and/or other Pacific Islanders (NHOPIs) and found a total of 32 articles in 23 social work journals published from 1995 to 2004 on these populations (reflecting 0.64 percent of all reviewed articles). Of these articles, only 15 focused on NHOPIs exclusively, with nine focusing on Native Hawaiians. The purpose of this article is to elucidate these findings by examining and analyzing the journalistic response to studies from a research project focused on Native Hawaiian youths. This project was funded by a five-year federal grant (K01 DA019884) and focused on the environmental and cultural context of drug use for Native Hawaiian youths. To date, the study has yielded two data sets (one qualitative and one quantitative) and seven different manuscripts. To supplement the findings of Mokuau et al., this article examines the comments from external reviewers on manuscripts from the project that were rejected for publication. Comments from 13 reviewers or editors from six different journals were included in this analysis. Social work (n = 2), psychology (n = 2), and interdisciplinary (n = 2) journals reviewed and rejected manuscripts from this project over a two-year period (2007 to 2009). Because all of the journals used a blind review process, demographic information on the external reviewers was not available. However, seven of the editors from the journals were male, and one was female. An analysis of the narrative critiques was made, establishing common themes evolving from the reviews. The most common critique (from five journals and seven reviewers or editors) focused on the "sample" or the "population." For example, one editor from a psychology journal rejected a qualitative manuscript on the basis of the "non representativeness of the sample. "A reviewer from an interdisciplinary journal similarly indicated that another qualitative manuscript "was quite limited in its applicability." These studies were based on focus group data from 47 sixth- through eight-grade Native Hawaiian youths in five middle or intermediate schools from two Hawaiian Islands. Manuscripts focused on survey data (N = 249) from the project have also met with a similar response. The editor from a top-tier social work journal indicated that the reviewed manuscript was both "well written and interesting ... but the focus was too narrow for [the journal]." As part of the justification for rejecting a related manuscript, another editor from a top-tier interdisciplinary journal stated that the sample size was "too small." In some cases, reviewers demanded that the manuscripts justify the relevance of the population. Immediately after a section in a qualitative manuscript on drug and health disparities of Native Hawaiian youths, which was intended to demonstrate the need for drug use research with the population, one reviewer from an interdisciplinary journal asked, "Why Hawaiian youth?" The reviewer further stated that "the author(s) should make a stronger case for why the emphasis [is] on this particular youth group/culture." In the review of another qualitative manuscript, a reviewer from a social work journal insisted that the drug resistance behaviors of Native Hawaiian youths be compared with those of white youths to establish their cultural relevance (even though data on white youths were not collected for this phase of the study). One approach to address these types of reviews might be to contextualize the population of Native Hawaiians within the broader categories of Asian Pacific Islanders and/or indigenous populations, thus increasing the generalizability of the research. However, this approach reflects an oversimplification of the specific issues of different Asian, Pacific Islander, and indigenous groups and is one of the research practices that Mokuau et al. (2008) critique in their article. Mokuau et al. …