Placing Community Psychology in the Context of the Social, Health and Educational Sciences: Directions for Interdisciplinary Research and Action

Building on Maton, Perkins and Saegert’s framework on inter-disciplinary work related to community psychology, this article addresses two questions about community psychology in the context of the social, health and educational sciences: (1) What can community psychology learn from other disciplines? and (2) What can community psychology uniquely contribute to other disciplines?     

Interdisciplinary Linkage of Community Psychology and Cross-Cultural Psychology: History, Values, and an Illustrative Research and Action Project on Intimate Partner Violence

An analysis of the respective organizational histories, missions, and scholarly activity of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology and the Society for Community Research and Action was conducted in order to inform the development of interdisciplinary linkages between members of the two organizations. The analysis revealed many points of shared values and actions, as well as some important differences. Both scholarly organizations developed out of a similar historical and cultural zeitgeist in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The missions emphasize the role of culture/diversity in psychological phenomena, adopting an interdisciplinary orientation, the value of collaboration, the importance of research method and ethics, and the value of action research. However, community psychology generally lacks an adequate treatment of cultural phenomena while cross-cultural psychology often fails to draw on community and participatory methods useful for understanding culture in context. These common roots and differences are examined. Finally, we describe a community based, participatory research and intervention project to address intimate partner violence among Latinos and European-Americans living in Oregon. Analysis of the research process and on some of our initial findings illustrates challenges and potential benefits of an interdisciplinary, cultural community psychology.     

Overcoming Inequality in Schooling: A Call to Action for Community Psychology

Community psychology, indeed psychology as a discipline, has been largely absent from the table of school reform. Schools are critical socializing forces in society and serve as the one institution through which the full diversity of our child population passes. At the start of the 21st century, despite successive waves of legislation, the goals of the civil rights struggle for equality in educational opportunity have yet to be achieved. Negative self-fulfilling prophecies, reflected at individual, interpersonal, institutional, and societal levels, play a critical role in creating and perpetuating unequal opportunities to learn. Such effects as well as pathways for preventive intervention are best understood through ecological lenses. Our field must commit a greater share of resources to collaborative and systemic change for a broader learning so that all children, regardless of their differences, have continuing and nonstigmatized opportunities to develop into competent adults.     

Enhancing the Cognitive Vitality of Older Adults

Aging is associated with decline in a multitude of cognitive processes and brain functions. However, a growing body of literature suggests that age-related decline in cognition can sometimes be reduced through experience, cognitive training, and other interventions such as fitness training. Research on cognitive training and expertise has suggested that age-related cognitive sparing is often quite narrow, being observed only on tasks and skills similar to those on which individuals have been trained. Furthermore, training and expertise benefits are often realized only after extensive practice with specific training strategies. Like cognitive training, fitness training has narrow effects on cognitive processes, but in the case of fitness training, the most substantial effects are observed for executive-control processes.     

Commentary on the Future of Community Psychology: Perspective of a Research Community Psychologist

Community psychology is commented upon from the perspective of a community psychologist who was trained in the Community Psychology Program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her background and training are reviewed. A brief survey of research on homelessness as a frame for community psychology research is presented. Concluding remarks are provided on the future of research in community psychology.     

Power and Action in Critical Theory Across Disciplines: Implications for Critical Community Psychology

Although critical scholarship and community psychology share similar aspirations, the links between them remain unexplored and under-theorized. In this article we explore the implications of critical scholarship in various specialties for the field of community psychology. To understand the contributions of critical scholarship to a theory of power and action for social change, we conducted a systematic analysis of a ten-year period of publications in seven journals associated with the critical scholarship tradition. We created precise criteria for the concepts of power and action and applied them to the publications. Results indicate an interesting paradox at play. Whereas community psychology is more action oriented than critical scholarship, its actions fall short of challenging institutionalized power structures and the status quo; and whereas critical scholarship is more challenging of the status quo than community psychology in theory, it has failed to produce viable actions that challenge the status quo. We discuss the implications of this state of affairs for the development of a more critical community psychology.     

Community Psychology at the Crossroads: Prospects for Interdisciplinary Research

Effective engagement in interdisciplinary work is critical if community psychology is to achieve its promise as a field of ecological inquiry and social action. The purpose of this paper and special issue is to help make the benefits of interdisciplinary community research clearer and to identify and begin to address its challenges. Although some areas of psychology (e.g., biological, cognitive and health) have made substantial interdisciplinary strides in recent decades, progress in community psychology (and related areas) is more modest. In this article we explore the prospects for expanding and improving interdisciplinary community research. Challenges include designs, measures, and analytical frameworks that integrate multiple levels of analysis from individuals through families, organizations, and communities to policy jurisdictions, and the complexities involved in simultaneously bringing together multiple disciplinary collaborators and community partners. Challenges to interdisciplinary collaboration common to all disciplines include the disciplinary nature of academic culture and reward structures, limited funding for interdisciplinary work and uncertainties related to professional identity and marketability. Overcoming these challenges requires a synergy among facilitative factors at the levels of the interdisciplinary project team (e.g., the framing question; embedded relationships; leadership), the investigators (e.g., commitment to new learning; time to invest), and the external context (e.g., physical, administrative, economic and intellectual resources and support for interdisciplinary work). We conclude by identifying several exemplars of effective interdisciplinary collaborations and concrete steps our field can take to enhance our development as a vibrant community-based, multilevel discipline increasingly devoted to interdisciplinary inquiry and action.     

The Listening Partners Program: An Initiative Toward Feminist Community Psychology in Action

The Listening Partners intervention is described and analyzed as a synthesis of feminism and community psychology, within a developmental framework. Working from an empowerment perspective, this social action, peer group intervention supported a community of poor, rural, isolated, young, White mothers to gain a greater voice, claim the powers of their minds, and collaborate in developmental leadership—creating settings that promote their own development and that of their families, peers, and communities. High quality dialogue, individual and group narrative, and collaborative problem-solving were emphasized, in a feminist context affirming diversity, inclusiveness, strengths, social-contextual analyses, and social constructivist perspectives. The power of enacting a synergy of feminism and community psychology is highlighted.     

Self Research in Educational Psychology: A Cautionary Tale of Positive Psychology in Action

Recent calls for a positive psychology that would deemphasize human pathology and dysfunction in favor of building an understanding of positive features of human life and human flourishing make two assumptions that the author questions in this article. First, he challenges the assumption that disciplinary psychology has been fixated on pathology and dysfunction by considering work in educational psychology that, both historically and currently, espouses the characteristics of positive psychology as articulated by its major advocates. Second, through a brief, critical consideration of research on the self in educational psychology, he contests the assumption that psychology has sufficient resources to develop into the positive psychology envisioned by its promoters. He argues that psychology's emphasis on the individual, whose core self resides in a deep, internal psyche, radically strips psychology of the historical and sociocultural resources that enable self-development, constrain self-understanding, and constitute the self.     

心理和行为研究中的学科交叉

现代心理学研究中许多的科学问题都需要多学科的共同努力。虽然研究者们能够认识到学科交叉中蕴藏着巨大的科学机会,但也还存在着一些阻碍学科交叉的因素。主要包括:对待学科交叉研究的态度、学术交流渠道不畅、现有的学科体系、基金评审体系的不适应以及从事交叉学科研究的学者的职业发展前景等。在现阶段,充分利用信息技术提供的便利条件,针对国家需求开展合作研究和学术交流是推动交叉学科研究发展的方向之一。     

Community Psychology Is (Thank God) More Than Science

Thinking about Community Psychology primarily as a science may make it harder, rather than easier, to embrace certain aspects of the field to which we are deeply committed, but usually fall outside the conventional meaning of doing science. While community psychologists use (and expand) the tools of science, this is different than saying that Community Psychology is only, or even primarily, a science. The field is just as much social criticism as it is science. In order to further conversation about these matters, seven thoughts about why (thank God) community psychology is more than a science are offered, the most basic of which is that today the greatest danger to freedom is not in the union of church and state, but in the union of science and state.Based on a paper presented at a Symposium, A. Wandersman (Chair), Science and Community Psychology, Held at the 9th Biennial Meeting of the Society for Community Research and Action, June, 2003, Las Vegas, New Mexico.     

Community Action and Research as Citizenship Construction

Social change, well-being and liberation have been intertwined in community research and action, as much as being used as political common-places. In this paper, it is argued that community research and action can have a political character. The epistemological premises shared by both the community and political spheres are discussed, and concepts are defined. The way community psychological action can produce changes is illustrated by an experience carried out with children from poverty sectors of Caracas, Venezuela, intended to construct citizenship by developing awareness about values, civic rights and duties, while experiencing the advantages of participation, peaceful negotiation and solidarity, during art classes. Topics regarding citizenship values and ethics were painted and discussed in a participatory way. Results about how the children developed consciousness about those topics, relating them to their lives, are presented.