Community Power Structure Analysis and the Ethical Considerations of “Studying Up”

This narrative outlines our challenges in studying power and power structures within an individual‐level ethical framework. Taking a social ethics perspective, we share the story of our “sticky situation” (Campbell, 2016 ) that transpired during a multi‐year community partnership. We were asked, by our community partners, to help collect interview data without informed consent. As a team of community‐engaged university researchers, we were faced with a seemingly easy ethical situation (no consent, no research) that had unexpectedly complicated and long‐lasting consequences. This experience revealed to us how community‐engaged research and action, under a traditional ethics framework, can often work to protect those in positions of power and offer little to disrupt the status quo. Reflecting on the tension between individual and social ethics, we discuss the limitations of an individual‐level framework, including the definitions for respect for persons, justice, and beneficence, on our ability as a field to understand, critique, and contribute to the dismantling of oppressive power structures.     

Valuing Our Communities: Ethical Considerations for Economic Evaluation of Community‐Based Prevention

Restricted public budgets and increasing efforts to link the impact of community interventions to public savings have increased the use of economic evaluation. While this type of evaluation can be important for program planning, it also raises important ethical issues about how we value the time of local stakeholders who support community interventions. In particular, researchers navigate issues of scientific accuracy, institutional inequality, and research utility in their pursuit of even basic cost estimates. We provide an example of how we confronted these issues when estimating the costs of a large‐scale community‐based intervention. Principles for valuing community members’ time and conducting economic evaluations of community programs are discussed.     

The impact of organisational change on professionals working within a Community Mental Health Team (CMHT): a psychodynamic perspective

The aim of this study was to explore the effects of organisational change upon staff working in a Community Mental Health Team (CMHT). A grounded theory methodology was employed to analyse data from eight interviews with a range of staff. Analysis identified one core category and five key categories. ‘Corrosion of good work: an ethos in decline’ represents the core category and refers to the staff members’ sense of demoralisation of their professional values and integrity. The first key category, ‘Cultural change’, refers to staff members’ perception of change within the CMHT, with an increased emphasis on regulation, performance management and proceduralisation. Three further key categories were identified: ‘Caring clinicians and uncaring managers’, ‘Confusion regarding professional roles’ and ‘Disconnecting and isolating’. The fifth key ‘Staff departing and increasing risk for clients’, describes the impact of the working culture. These categories and emerging theory were interpreted through a psychodynamic lens, and identified the need for better management practice, support, training and supervision of staff as the foundations of safe practice.     

Individual,Community, and National Resilience in Peace Time and in the Face of Terror: A Longitudinal Study

The present paper is based on thrice-repeated measures. The sample constituted 561 Jewish Israeli adults who experienced these terror attacks. The study examined individual, community and national resilience and their associations with resilience-promoting factors (sense of coherence, social support, and self-efficacy); as well as resilience-suppressing factors (distress symptoms, sense of danger, and exposure). Results indicated that resilience scores were quite stable across the three repeated measures, whereas sense of coherence, distress symptoms, sense of danger, and exposure significantly changed across the three repeated measures. Sense of coherence was the best predictor for individual, community, and national resilience.     

The Tablighi Jama‘at in Southwestern Ontario: making Muslim identities and networks in Canadian urban spaces

This ethnographic paper builds on previous research on the Tablighi Jama‘at by delving deeper into the ways in which the movement creates identity and community among Muslims living in modern/post-modern urban spaces. The paper is grounded in the theoretical framework provided by Robert Orsi in his introduction to Gods of the City (1999). In his lengthy introduction, Orsi describes contemporary urban cultural theory. This theory posits metropolitan regions as comprising “complex networks of “pathways” that city people travel in” (51). Along these “pathways” city dwellers create networks of association that in turn become ways of life and communities. Orsi notes that, “urban religious idioms have responded to the spatial dilemmas created by the circumstances of diaspora and dislocation” (51). These urban religious idioms often involve intra-communal outreach that seeks to inculcate community members with a cognitive “map” of the surrounding urban spaces, marking off both desirable and forbidden places. I argue that this is precisely what the Tablighi Jama‘at seeks to engender in urban spaces such as Southwestern Ontario, and this study is undertaken to better understand this process of identity construction and community creation.

‘Exploding the Limits of Law’: Judgment and Freedom in Arendt and Adorno

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt struggled to defend the possibility of judgment against the obvious problems encountered in attempts to offer legally valid and morally meaningful judgments of those who had committed crimes in morally bankrupt communities. Following Norrie, this article argues that Arendt’s conclusions in Eichmann are equivocal and incoherent. Exploring her perspectival theory of judgment, the article suggests that Arendt remains trapped within certain Kantian assumptions in her philosophy of history, and as such sees the question of freedom in a binary way. The article argues that Adorno’s philosophy of freedom provides the resources to diagnose and overcome Arendt’s shortcomings. Adorno’s position provides a way of embracing the antinomical character of judgment, by emphasising the need for elements of reason and nature in the phenomenon of freedom. In Adorno’s lights, judgment becomes an attempt to express a ‘spirit of solidarity’ with the tragic status of the potentially free but actually unfree subject of modernity.

The Importance of the Community Context in the Epidemiology of Early Adolescent Substance Use and Delinquency in a Rural Sample

Considerable research has demonstrated that substance use and delinquency during early adolescence can have long-term negative health consequences. As the correlates of these behaviors cross levels and contexts, it is likely that a social ecological approach will provide insight to inform community prevention. This approach informs the present study, which focuses on developing a multiple-method measurement strategy to examine associations among community risks, resources, and rates of early adolescent substance use and delinquency in 28 rural and small town communities. Measures include five domains of community risk, four domains of community resources, and population rates of early adolescent substance use and delinquency. Results demonstrated that several measures of context were significantly associated with community rates of adolescent substance use and delinquency, and different risks and resources appear important for different outcomes. Multiple associations were curvilinear, and interactions may also be important. Findings suggest that it may be worthwhile to create and test new intervention strategies that target community factors in the pursuit of prevention.     

Theorising Interventions as Events in Systems

Conventional thinking about preventive interventions focuses over simplistically on the “package” of activities and/or their educational messages. An alternative is to focus on the dynamic properties of the context into which the intervention is introduced. Schools, communities and worksites can be thought of as complex ecological systems. They can be theorised on three dimensions: (1) their constituent activity settings (e.g., clubs, festivals, assemblies, classrooms); (2) the social networks that connect the people and the settings; and (3) time. An intervention may then be seen as a critical event in the history of a system, leading to the evolution of new structures of interaction and new shared meanings. Interventions impact on evolving networks of person-time-place interaction, changing relationships, displacing existing activities and redistributing and transforming resources. This alternative view has significant implications for how interventions should be evaluated and how they could be made more effective. We explore this idea, drawing on social network analysis and complex systems theory.     

Keeping the Spirit of Community Partnerships Alive in the Scale Up of HIV/AIDS Prevention: Critical Reflections on the Roll Out of DEBI (Diffusion of Effective Behavioral Interventions)

DEBI, or the Diffusion of Effective Behavioral Interventions is the largest centralized effort to diffuse evidence-based prevention science to fight HIV/AIDS in the United States. DEBI seeks to ensure that the most effective science-based prevention interventions are widely implemented across the country in community-based organizations. Thus, this is a particularly timely juncture in which to critically reflect on the extent to which known principles of community collaboration have guided key processes associated with the DEBI rollout. We review the available evidence on how the dissemination of packaged interventions is necessary but not sufficient for ensuring the success of technology transfer. We consider additional principles that are vital for successful technology transfer, which were not central considerations in the rollout of the DEBI initiative. These issues are: (1) community perceptions of a top-down mode of dissemination; (2) the extent to which local innovations are being embraced, bolstered, or eliminated; and (3) contextual and methodological considerations that shape community preparedness. Consideration of these additional factors is necessary in order to effectively document, manage, and advance the science of dissemination and technology transfer in centralized prevention efforts within and outside of HIV/AIDS.     

How the Powerful Decide: Access to Research Participation by those at the Margins

How do those in power decide to include and exclude those at the margins from community life? We used simulated review of research vignettes to examine how researchers and members of Institutional Review Boards make decisions concerning the research participation of adults with and without intellectual disabilities. Results indicate that decision‐makers are influenced by the disability status of the sample, characteristics of the research in which they are engaged, and their attitudes toward the research participation of adults with intellectual disabilities as well as their own relationship to the research process. For example, decision‐makers may create situations that limit the self‐determination of adults with intellectual disabilities and adults without disabilities within the research context, particularly when the research poses some risk of harm to participants. Implications for theory, action and research are explored.