Koe wai hoki koe?!, or "Who are you?!": issues of trust in cross-cultural collaborative research

Cross-cultural research designs are increasingly employed in the New Zealand context to investigate a range of complex social and environmental issues. However, there is little guidance for researchers who work for mainstream organisations and hapu (subtribe(s)) and iwi (tribe(s)) on how to undertake cross-cultural collaborative research. Trust is a key issue that makes cross-cultural research possible and it is surprising that issues relating to trust have not featured widely in the literature. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences working cross-culturally and collaboratively with a hapu in Northland, New Zealand. We discuss how a mainstream research organisation worked with a community health trust and developed a working relationship with a hapu, forming the basis of a community-driven collaborative evaluation of a central government-funded project. Key findings were the establishment of a tuakana-teina relationship (where teacher and learner are interchangeable) between the members of the collaborative research team and the employment of appropriate research methods to develop a research agenda that ensured everyone would benefit from the research.