Free and Frank Advice: Āta, Research Relationships and the Insider-Indigenous Researcher

07/02/2026

I explain how Āta shaped the research relationships in my thesis, what being an insider-Indigenous researcher gave the inquiry and asked of it, and how confidentiality was protected in a small senior public service.

This is the ninth of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis on free and frank advice in Aotearoa. The previous post set out the decentred approach and Q-methodology; this one turns to the relationships through which the research was done, and to the ethical commitments that still govern how I report it.

The decentred approach comes to Aotearoa with a question attached, which is whether a theory developed within and for British governance can be applied here unchanged, and my answer in the thesis is that it cannot, because the Westminster and Whitehall inheritances were received in Aotearoa into a constitutional order already shaped by Te Tiriti o Waitangi, tikanga Māori, rangatiratanga and continuing Māori authority.

In this post I do three things: first, I explain how Āta, a Māori methodological practice, extended the decentred approach and what it did, and did not do, in the research; second, I describe my own position as an insider-Indigenous researcher, the access that proximity gave and the discipline it required; and third, I set out the ethics of the study, including the confidentiality promised to participants, which is also the reason this series reports the findings without participant quotations.

Āta as methodological practice

Āta is a Māori methodological practice drawn from tikanga Māori and elaborated for research as a takepu, a preferred way of engaging that provides a template for how to be in relationship with others and how to invite others into a research relationship (Pohatu, 2013). Six of its forms carried methodological weight in my research: Āta-haere, approaching with deliberation and care; Āta-whakarongo, listening with reflective attention; Āta-whakaaro, thinking with deliberation and depth; Āta-kōrero, communicating with clarity and purpose; Āta-noho, giving quality time to be with people and their issues; and Āta-hoki marire, returning with respectful recognition of consequences. In the thesis these were working practices that guided how relationships were entered, how accounts were listened to, how interpretation was kept open and how findings were returned, and I regard them as the practices that kept the inquiry accountable to the people from whom the knowledge came.

In practice Āta did three distinct things in the research, the first of which was to shape the research relationships and create the conditions for disclosure from senior practitioners, with recruitment proceeding through careful relational judgement and the pace of engagement set by participants. Second, it shaped the constitution of the sample, since Māori and Pacific practitioners were deliberately included across all three stages in proportions greater than their representation in the senior public service, and Māori or Indigenous practitioners made up 39, or 28%, of the 141 people approached, so that the findings would not rest on a homogeneous Pākehā sample interpreting a Crown-derived convention. Third, it created conditions in all three stages within which practitioners themselves could name the limits of the Westminster frame, and could name obligations arising from Te Tiriti o Waitangi if they regarded those obligations as structuring features of free and frank advice. In my view that third effect is the one that matters most for how the findings can be read, because it means that findings still organised through Westminster categories can be treated as an empirical result, a finding about the advisory field itself.

Āta has limits in the design, and I state them plainly in the thesis. It sits beside the interpretive approach and does not replace it, and it does not turn the thesis into a kaupapa Māori study in the full sense; the relationship between the two bodies of theory is one of juxtaposition, each contributing something the other lacks and neither absorbing the other into its categories (Smith, 2012). Āta also cannot decide whether shared patterns of meaning exist across practitioners, which is the work of Q-methodology, and Q-methodology in turn may or may not produce a Te Tiriti o Waitangi perspective in the factor solution, because it maps the advisory relationship as practitioners currently inhabit it. I moved between the two bodies of theory in the same unresolved condition that Te Tiriti o Waitangi establishes between kāwanatanga and rangatiratanga, and the absence of a Te Tiriti perspective from the factor solution, had it occurred, would itself have been a finding about where the system currently sits.

The insider-Indigenous researcher

The methodological condition I had to account for was proximity, because I came to this research as a former senior public servant who had worked for more than two decades inside the advisory relationships, institutional networks and political-administrative settings through which free and frank advice is practised, and as an Indigenous practitioner whose public service experience had been formed inside Crown institutions in Aotearoa. Professional proximity gave the research intimate knowledge of organisational culture, informal practice and tacit understanding (Costley, Elliott, & Gibbs, 2010), and it helped me recognise the language practitioners used, the distinctions they drew and the points at which caution entered their accounts. Senior practitioners have good reasons to speak carefully about advice to ministers, and in this study proximity helped create the conditions in which matters that are often difficult to name could be discussed, making the undiscussable discussable (Argyris, 1980). I count that access as the main thing an insider brought to this inquiry, and I also count it as the main thing that had to be checked.

The risk that came with professional proximity was over-recognition, the danger that I would hear a participant too quickly, fill gaps from my own experience, or let professional memory complete a meaning the participant had left unspoken, and that participants in turn would assume shared knowledge and leave part of their reasoning unstated. I managed that risk during interviews by asking participants to explain their examples, define their terms, describe when their judgement changed, and say where other practitioners might understand the convention differently. After interviews and validation discussions I kept notes on what had been said, what I thought I had heard and what I may have assumed, and in analysis I returned to transcripts, sort explanations and validation material to distinguish participant meaning from my own memory. In my view these routines made the risk of proximity visible enough to be checked, and I do not claim more for them than that.

Indigenous proximity belonged to the same insider condition and brought a different kind of alertness. Because my public service experience was formed inside Crown institutions, in a constitutional order shaped by Te Tiriti o Waitangi, colonisation, tikanga Māori and continuing Māori authority, the Westminster frame stayed visible to me as a frame, and I could see that free and frank advice had to be studied as more than a convention of executive government standing on neutral constitutional terrain. The empirical question still had to be answered through practitioner meaning, however, and the interpretive risk was substitution, in which professional memory, insider familiarity or my own constitutional critique could have displaced the meanings practitioners gave the convention. Āta governed the relational conduct of the inquiry, Q-methodology required participants to order the statements for themselves, and Stage Three validation tested whether the interpretation was recognisable, which together, in my judgement, kept my proximity accountable to participant meaning.

Ethics and confidentiality in a small world

The ethical framework for the research drew first on Āta and on obligations flowing from Te Tiriti o Waitangi, including the principles of Māori data sovereignty, the right of Māori to govern the collection, ownership and application of data about Māori and the Māori world (Hudson, Milne, Reynolds, Russell, & Smith, 2010). The University of Canterbury Ethics Committee approved the research, and the institutional approval sat within that wider commitment, from which the specific practices of consent, confidentiality, data governance and the management of insider research followed. In my view those commitments are part of why participants could speak as openly as many of them did.

The conditions of the research created three risks that intersected with one another. The first arose from the small size of the senior public service community in Aotearoa, in which a combination of policy domain, period and institutional context can identify a person despite formal anonymisation (Tolich, 2004). The second arose from my former position, since participants may have felt obliged to take part, disclosed more than they would to an outsider, or assumed understandings I needed to examine, and familiarity can slide into accepting elite narratives at face value. The third arose from the convention itself, because practitioners were being asked to say what statute, scholarship and institutional prescription had left to them, in conditions where candour about advisory practice may itself feel professionally risky. In my view each of these risks belonged to studying free and frank advice from the inside, and none could be managed by procedure alone.

Consent was treated as an ongoing relationship, and confidentiality as a matter that took precedence over the analytical preference for thick description. The participant information disclosed my insider status and Indigenous positionality, the consent discussion was honest that absolute anonymity could not be guaranteed in so small a community, and participants kept the right to withdraw, to have data deleted, to review and amend transcripts and to choose their level of anonymity. Roles were aggregated into wider categories, temporal detail that could identify anyone was avoided, composite examples were used where needed, participants reviewed and approved any quotation before it appeared, and some quotations were set aside because they could indicate who the participant was. For the same reason, because participants were promised confidentiality, these posts report the findings at the level of the postures, the fault lines, the statements and the argument, without participant quotations or any detail that might identify anyone.

The ethics and the design together carried two tests into the findings. The first was whether practitioner meaning could be moved from interview accounts into a Q-sort structure and back into validation intact, and the five participants who took part in all three stages gave the most direct test of that. The second was whether the advisory field would remain organised by Westminster concepts even under conditions designed to make other constitutional framings speakable, and it is against those conditions, Āta, deliberate inclusion, wānanga and validation, that the appearance or absence of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in the postures has to be read. As I set out later in this series, Te Tiriti marks the constitutional limit of the field the thesis maps, a pressure at the edge of the advisory relationship that the postures only partly integrate, and in my view that finding carries weight precisely because the method was built to let it surface.

In the next post I begin reporting the findings with Stage One, and the six domains of advisory practice that the interviews revealed.

References

Argyris, C. (1980). Making the undiscussable and its undiscussability discussable. Public Administration Review, 40(3), 205–213.

Costley, C., Elliott, G., & Gibbs, P. (2010). Doing work based research: Approaches to enquiry for insider-researchers. SAGE.

Hudson, M., Milne, M., Reynolds, P., Russell, K., & Smith, B. (2010). Te Ara Tika: Guidelines for Maori research ethics. Health Research Council of New Zealand.

Pohatu, T. W. (2013). Ata: Growing respectful relationships. Ata: Journal of Psychotherapy Aotearoa New Zealand, 17(1), 13–26.

Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). Zed Books.

Tolich, M. (2004). Internal confidentiality: When confidentiality assurances fail relational informants. Qualitative Sociology, 27(1), 101–106.