Research Assistant IV

Education Level Completed a relevant post-secondary degree.

Career Level Minimum of 12 months experience.

Hourly Rate $26-$37 per hour

Expected Start Date October 2026

Dr. Lee de Bie, Postdoctoral Fellow in McMaster University’s School of Social Work, community partners Peer Support Canada (Allison Dunning, Executive Director) and Peer Works Ontario (Allyson Theodorou, Executive Director), and co-investigators Rochelle Maurice, Dr. Tina Wilson, Vaishnavi Yogendran, and Dr. Christina Sinding invite applications for three research assistant positions to support a national peer support project funded by a SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant.

Peer support (PS) involves drawing on shared lived experiences to learn from and support each other. Manifestations of ‘peer’ work and the terms used to describe it can vary significantly across diverse contexts. They include, but are not limited to, formal and informal, funded and grassroots self-help, mutual aid, PS, consciousness-raising, healing, and community care collectives, as well as other initiatives that affirm the value of supporting each other through lived, living, and shared experiences (e.g., of an illness, disability, identity, heritage, culture, phenomenon, or form of marginalization).

The national values for peer support practice released in Canada in 2013 have been widely adopted. Yet there are significant limitations in how these values have been sourced and articulated that warrant suspicion of the implied consensus. This study will contribute to research on interrogating professional ethics/values to support equity and reconciliation.

The 2009 consultation process that led to the articulation of Canada’s PS values involved minimally described methods: an international literature review and environmental scan of policy frameworks, a 3-question survey of 65 PS organizations, and endorsement by an unspecified group of PS leaders.

Similar gaps and concerns about process repeat across the international literature. Statements of “international consensus” on PS values continue to disproportionately reference leadership, materials, and knowledge from PS in the Global North. Conceptualizations of PS values are commonly consolidated from literature reviews with little indication of how articles were identified and selected, privileging dominant Western, Eurocentric, White accounts of PS practice.

Projects that move beyond literature synthesis to involve new consultation or engagement with peer supporters are commonly small in size, do not disclose or consider the presence and impact of sociodemographic diversity on results, and/or fail to meaningfully involve groups commonly underrepresented in PS knowledge and policy. The analytic processes used to arrive at a finalized set of PS values is rarely or poorly described.

The limited content on PS values is also impactful. The current national definitions of PS values are each only a sentence long, contributing to variation in how they are understood, used, prioritized, and balanced to justify and support particular practices. The few detailed analyses of PS values that exist reflect minimal awareness of considerations related to equity and intersectionality. A core tension in PS between individualistic relational values (e.g., self-determination) and collective values (e.g., social justice, advocacy) is under examined, risking the infiltration of dominant ideologies of individualism into PS practice, the supplanting of its social justice roots, and “ peer support drift ”.

Moreover, the PS community will continue to struggle to address racism in PS work and services…