Indigenous theorizing in a complex world

Indigenization in psychology leads to modes of theorizing based within local knowledge communities and defined in terms of culturally relevant criteria. The present study offers a conceptualization of the social psychology of science in terms of complexity theory. The value of alternative choices in advancing psychological knowledge is shown by a knowledge landscape whose shape depends on the diversity of paradigms within the community. Dominance by a single paradigm (such as a Western world view) leads to a single-peaked landscape where advances in knowledge are judged using only the criteria of that paradigm. Here, the most effective form of working is incremental step-by-step research; but this ignores the historical context of the indigenous community and runs the risk of promoting a kind of psychology that is irrelevant to its values and priorities. Indigenization is presented as a complexification of the knowledge community building on a diversity of world views, leading to a rugged, multiple-peaked knowledge landscape. Four features of working on rugged landscapes are examined: path dependence, showing the importance of history for shaping the direction of research; fostering research progress through seeding of multiple starting points; the benefits of locally dense networks within knowledge communities; and the role of policy-makers in tuning knowledge landscapes. Examples are drawn from the development of indigenous psychology within a number of countries.     

Empowering communities through social media

Multicultural competence is a cornerstone of modern day counseling psychology. The new multicultural and social justice competencies highlight the integration of social justice and multicultural frameworks. These competencies include community engagement through social justice advocacy. Social media may be one way to advocate for social justice for underserved or marginalized communities. Social media networks impact in the Arab Spring and the 2016 United States (U.S.) Presidential election suggests that people may utilize social media to inform and act on their social or political views. Throughout this article, we will explore the benefits of social media for raising critical consciousness, as defined by Freire, and examine how counseling psychologists can utilize social media to engage in social justice advocacy in diverse communities.     

Diverse community contexts and community resources for sexual and gender minority youth: A mixed‐methods study

Sexual and gender minority (SGM) youth face marginalization and oppression on the basis of their SGM identity, and they often lack traditional support systems to deal with these minority stressors. SGM community resources may alleviate the impact of the stressors that SGM youth face, but these have not been studied in relation to the size and climate of SGM youth's communities. This mixed‐methods study examined the relationship between community size and the climate toward SGM individuals and the availability and utilization of SGM community resources. Survey findings indicate that nonmetropolitan communities were associated with less availability and utilization; hostile communities were associated with lower availability only. Interview findings reveal nuanced complexities on the relationship between community and resource provision. Implications for future research and community practice are discussed.     

Supporting Out‐of‐School Time Staff in Low Resource Communities: A Professional Development Approach

Federally funded out‐of‐school time (OST) programs provide academic support, enrichment, and safety for students and families in low‐resource communities. However, programs struggle to meet these aims, in part because of the lack of program structure and limited training and support for staff. This observational case study documents the training and technical assistance (TA) delivered to OST frontline staff and program leadership to implement Positive Behavior in Out‐of‐School Time (Positive BOOST), an adaptation of positive behavior interventions and supports conducted in multiple settings. Findings across three programs indicate that varied levels of TA (i.e., business as usual, performance feedback, coaching) are associated with different levels of staff‐ and program‐level implementation. Taken together with previous research, these findings suggest that targeted investment in developing the skills of OST staff and improving program‐wide outcomes is critical for supporting youth in low‐resource communities.     

“The Thing Happened as He Wished”: Recovering an American Indian Cultural Psychology

One of the chief questions confronting mental health professionals who serve American Indian communities is how best to offer genuinely helpful services that do not simultaneously and surreptitiously reproduce colonial power relations. To ensure that counselors and therapists do not engage in psy‐colonization, it is crucial to recognize the sometimes divergent cultural foundations of mental distress, disorder, and well‐being in “Indian Country.” In this article, I will consider four excerpts from a research interview undertaken among my own people, the Aaniiih Gros Ventres of north‐central Montana. At a superficial level, these excerpts seem to reinforce reigning sensibilities that are readily familiar within the mental health professions. And yet, closer analysis of these interview excerpts reveals several tantalizing facets of an indigenous cultural psychology that may well continue to shape life and experience among tribal members in this setting. I recover this distinctive cultural psychology through archival representations of cultural and community life, including analysis of an important tribal myth. This analysis makes possible an alterNative interpretation of these interview excerpts, grounded in an aboriginal cosmology, that yields important implications for conceiving a more inclusive knowledge base for psychology that only robust community engagement can reveal.     

Beyond the Belmont Principles: A Community‐Based Approach to Developing an Indigenous Ethics Model and Curriculum for Training Health Researchers Working with American Indian and Alaska Native Communities

Individuals responsible for carrying out research within their diverse communities experience a critical need for research ethics training materials that align with community values. To improve the capacity to meet local human subject protections, we created the research Ethics Training for Health in Indigenous Communities (rETHICS), a training curriculum aligned within American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) context, culture, and community‐level ethical values and principles. Beginning with the Belmont Report and the Common Rule that defines research with human subjects (46 CFR 45), the authors convened three different expert panels (N = 37) to identify Indigenous research values and principles common across tribal communities. The resulting culturally grounded curriculum was then tested with 48 AI/AN individuals, 39 who also had recorded debriefing interviews. Using a thematic analysis, we coded the qualitative feedback from the expert panel discussions and the participant debriefings to assess content validity. Participants identified five foundational constructs needed to ensure cultural‐grounding of the AI/AN‐specific research training curriculum. These included ensuring that the module was: (a) framed within an AI/AN historical context; (b) reflected Indigenous moral values; (c) specifically linked AI/AN cultural considerations to ethical procedures; (d) contributed to a growing Indigenous ethics; and (e) provided Indigenous‐based ethics tools for decision making. Using community‐based consultation and feedback from participants led to a culturally grounded training curriculum that teaches research ethical principles and procedures for conducting research with AI/ANs. The curriculum is available for free and the community‐based process used can be adapted for other cultural groups.     

Collaboration with Urban Community Stakeholders: Refining Paraprofessional‐led Services to Promote Positive Parenting

This paper describes the process of a community–academic partnership to navigate implementation challenges for a school‐based service model led by paraprofessionals to promote positive parenting in high poverty urban communities. We describe the process by which we (a) identified implementation challenges, (b) sustained a university–community collaboration to redesign the paraprofessional service model, and (c) assessed the feasibility of the new model involving four social service agencies in 16 schools with over 600 families. The structure and process of the collaboration and refinement are described with attention to who was best positioned to engage in the collaboration and how the partnership worked to balance scientific rigor with responsiveness to paraprofessional workforce strengths. Feasibility data indicated that the revised model was successfully implemented by paraprofessional staff; 92.2% of possible staff monthly reports were completed and discussion of key goals was incorporated into 94.2% of interactions. Continual monitoring provided critical feedback from stakeholders as we drew on and interpreted these various sources of information to build and refine the service model. We suggest that these processes are critical steps to bridge the research‐to‐practice gap, by promoting practices that are aligned with the needs of children and families, and the staff who serve them.     

Web U2: Emerging Online Communities and Gendered Intimacy in the Asia-Pacific region

Unquestionably, the zeitgeist of Web 2.0 is symbolized by the dominance of social networking sites (SNS) and user-created content (UCC). MySpace, Facebook, and Cyworld mini-hompy are but a few examples of SNS that are becoming increasingly part of urban everyday life and interwoven into the historicity of the Internet. Web 2.0 has promised much about new forms of participation, creation, collaboration, and authorship, and yet within each location, we can find examples of both empowerment and exploitation. This is particularly the case in the divergent region of the Asia-Pacific. Rather than the region being a sum of “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983), this paper argues that the distributed social networks of Web 2.0 UCC is formed, informed, and maintained through the perpetual process of “imaging communities.” These imaging communities can be seen in the visual, textual, and aural modes of UCC and can be seen to reflect the region’s new technocultural cartographies.     

Environmental representations of local communities' spokespersons in protected areas

Despite the popularization of the environmental discourse, rural environmental belief‐systems should not be viewed as homogenous. Focusing on the largest protected area in Greece, we examined heterogeneity in local environmental views. Local spokespersons elicited word associations to two stimulus terms, namely, ‘environmentalists’ and ‘protected area’. Based on association categories for both terms, we identified two sample segments. ‘Naturalists’ appealed to a naturalistic image, which shaped the core compartment of their representations. On the other hand, ‘skeptics’ provided both environmentalist claims and critical accounts. Our findings revealed that the environmental discourse was widely diffused among local spokespersons. Issues of power and participation in decision‐making processes within protected areas are discussed. For instance, dimensions of power and legitimacy were reflected in the frequency of association categories and their allocation among sample segments. Specifically, environmentalist accounts were overtly expressed by both ‘naturalists’ and skeptics, while a more socially, politically and critically inclined view was revealed by a small percentage of associations that were all elicited by ‘skeptics’. We conclude that appreciating the heterogeneity of rural environmental views can reinforce the democratic mandate in environmental policy‐making. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.