Community psychology values and the culture of graduate training: A self-study

In this self-study of an M.A. program in community psychology, the authors focused on evaluation of training goals related to the values of collaboration, empowerment, and diversity. Employing quantitative and qualitative methods, the evaluator, a thesis student in the program, cooperated with a stakeholder committee and other student, staff, and faculty members of the program to construct the methods and interpret the findings. Although the converging sources of data showed that the program was meeting its process goals to some extent, several key issues in the culture of training, such as the status of women, the psychological sense of community, and a supportive learning environment, needed improvement. The authors interpret the findings in terms of the impact of the university system and patriarchal norms on training in community psychology. This study is based on the first author's M.A. thesis, which the second author supervised. Judit Alcalde works in health promotion with the Regional Municipality of Waterloo, Community Health Department. She presented an earlier version of this work at the conference of the Canadian Psychological Association, Calgary, Alberta, June 1991. We are grateful to the thesis committee members for their support and guidance, to our colleagues for their participation, to Paul Davock, and to the reviewers and editor for their helpful comments.     

Creating classrooms that students experience as communities

Although prior research has shown sense of community in schools to be related to many positive student characteristics, effective interventions that can create or enhance this sense have not been demonstrated. In this paper we describe a comprehensive elementary school program, implemented by teachers, that was successful in creating a sense of community in the classrooms, as perceived by students. The program was implemented in three elementary schools in a suburban school district; three additional schools in the same district served as a comparison group. The program, which emphasized cooperative learning, the importance of democratic and prosocial values, student autonomy and self-direction, and a child-centered approach to teaching and classroom management, was experienced by a cohort of students from kindergarten through Grade 4, and by a subset of that cohort through Grade 6. Sense of community was assessed—by questionnaire—in Grades 4, 5, and 6; various student outcomes were assessed via questionnaire and interview. Results indicated that the program was successful in heightening students’ sense of community, and that the sense of community—by itself and in combination with program status—related positively to a number of student outcomes. There was also suggestive evidence that students who experienced their classroom as a community attempted to abide by its norms and values, and that the authority structure of the classroom was an important determinant of students’ experience of community and of some of its observed effects. The project described in this paper was supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Symposium on Research on Effective and Responsible Teaching, Fribourg, Switzerland, September 1990. A brief, nontechnical summary of the findings described here was included in Solomon, Watson, Battistich, Schaps, and Delucchi, 1992. In addition to the authors, significant contributions to this work were made by numerous others, including Carole Cooper, Stefan Dasho, Jane Deer, Sylvia Kendzior, Allison Rickard, Wendy Ritchie, Marc Rosenberg, Judith Solomon, Carole Stone, Margaret Tauber, and Pat Tuck.     

Environmental factors and sense of community in a planned town

Previous community psychology research has suggested that sense of community can be a powerful explanatory tool for understanding community development and individual well-being, but has not focused on the relationship of environmental variables to the construct. In other disciplines—especially urban planning—this construct has received more attention but it has not been empirically and systematically studied. The three-phase qualitative study reported here sampled people representative of those who live and work in Seaside, FL, a town designed to induced sense of community. The data strongly suggest a relationship between a variable set that may define sense of community—membership, need fulfillment, shared emotional connections, loyalty—and the environmental variables of town design, architecture, and urban planning philosophy.     

Paths to community empowerment: Organizing at home

This study examines how low-income minority communities build on their strengths to improve material conditions and how these actions lead to further empowerment at the individual and group level, and increase engagement with civic life. Based on earlier qualitative research, low-income limited equity housing co-ops were chosen as research. Using quantitative questionnaire data, a path model was tested in which variables were organized into four levels.Level One: Attributes of the person and the context were conceptualized asexogenous variables leading to activities first at the co-op level.Level Two:co-op activities were thought to affect living conditions in the building and evaluations of co-op ownership, which comprisedLevel Three,quality of life in the building. All preceding levels were thought to influenceempowerment, as measured atLevel Four through an attitudinal measure of empowerment, and reported participation in civic activities in the broader community. The model, which emphasizes the collective and material nature of empowerment in addition to the psychological, seems justified by the data. It is especially significant that the aggregate measure of perceived participation of others predicted building quality, and that the aggregate measure of building quality went on to influence empowerment and voting behavior. Personal participation in building activities also proved a good predictor of empowerment, indicating that empowerment operates at both the individual and the group level. Furthermore, increased empowerment at the level of attitude did influence civic activities, in conjunction with personal characteristics and perceived neighborhood qualities. (Tests of causality in the opposite direction were not significant.) Our findings confirm the importance of all three components of empowerment, as articulated by Zimmerman and his colleagues (1992), that is, empowerment at the psychological, interactional, and behavioral level. It extends the conceptualization by introducing the group level of analysis. We thank the Robert F. Wagner Sr. Center for Urban Public Policy at the City University of New York Graduate School and University Center and the Fund for the City of New York for early support and the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation for current support. We acknowledge the invaluable participation in the original project of Heléne Clark, Eric Glunt, Bill Roane, and April Tyler. We also thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their helpful and extremely thorough comments and suggestions.     

Parents and peer group as mediators of the effect of community structure on adolescent problem behavior

Used a sample of 207 single-parent families residing in 104 small, Midwestern communities to test hypotheses regarding the link between community context and adolescent conduct problems and psychological distress. For boys, community disadvantage had a direct affect on psychological distress, while it indirectly boosted the probability of conduct problems by disrupting parenting and increasing affiliation with deviant peers. Community disadvantage was unrelated to the deviant behavior or emotional well-being of girls. Proportion of single-parent households in the community had a direct effect on girls' conduct problems. It also contributed indirectly to girls' conduct problems by increasing the probability of involvement with deviant peers. Possible explanations for these gender differences are provided. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Miami, November 1994. Work on this project was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (MH48165) and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD27724). Journal Paper No. 16629 of the Iowa Agriculture and Home Economic Experiment Station, Ames, Iowa. Project No. 3320.     

Increasing husbands' involvement in domestic labor: Issues for therapists

As a result of the dramatic increase in women's participation in the work force, more relationship therapists are seeing couples who are dissatisfied with how domestic labor is divided in their homes. Although, this issue may seem therapeutically straightforward, there are many aspects which make its renegotiation surprisingly problematic and complex. This article is an effort to delineate some of these issues such as engaging men in therapy, exploring emotional issues connected with housework, and the mechanism of gatekeeping. Also included is a therapeutic framework for addressing client concerns about domestic responsibilities.     

TRAINING AND GENERALIZATION OF LAUNDRY SKILLS: A MULTIPLE PROBE EVALUATION WITH HANDICAPPED PERSONS

An instructional procedure composed of a graded sequence of prompts and token reinforcement was used to train a complex chain of behaviors which included sorting, washing, and drying clothes. A multiple probe design with sequential instruction across seven major components of the laundering routine was used to demonstrate experimental control. Students were taught to launder clothing using machines located in their school and generalization was assessed later on machines located in the public laundromat. A comparison of students' laundry skills with those of normal peers indicated similar levels of proficiency. Follow-up probes demonstrated maintenance of laundry skills over a 10-month period.     

PROMPTING TECHNIQUES TO INCREASE THE RETURN RATE OF MAILED QUESTIONNAIRES1

To increase the return rate of questionnaires mailed to clergy and physicians concerning their mental-health practices, different prompts were used after the questionnaire was received during four mail-outs to four randomly drawn samples of clergy and physicians. For each mail-out, the sample was divided into experimental (received prompt) and comparison (no prompt) groups, and one type of prompt or combination was used. Non-returnees of the questionnaire in the experimental group received either: (a) a single telephone call, (b) a memo, (c) a package (personal letter and new questionnaire) or package plus a telephone call, or (d) a double call. Comparison physicians and clergy were mailed only the original questionnaire. Relative to their respective comparison group's return rate, which averaged 22% across the four mail-outs (range 18% to 24%), the single call and package alone about doubled the overall return rate, the package and call increased the return rate about two-and-a-half fold, and the double call almost tripled the return rate. The memo was ineffective. A cost-effectiveness analysis indicated that the double-call procedure was less expensive than the single call, and much less expensive than the package alone or package with a call in securing returns. An analysis of the pattern of returns showed clearly that when prompts were not delivered (comparison groups), very few returns were received after about seven days from the initial mail-out. Most returns from prompts (experimental groups) were received by several days after the prompt. The results were seen as salient to the problem of reducing selection or volunteer bias in questionnaire studies and subsequent research demonstrating the effectiveness of telephone calls made about a week after distribution of surveys in securing high return rates was discussed.     

The University as Learning Community

Organizations are increasingly faced with the need to "reinvent" themselves as they adapt to a changing society. In this article, the university is examined as one such organization. Faced with enormous pressures to educate an increasingly diverse group of students, equip them with skills for the global marketplace, and prepare them to be responsible citizens, the university must become a more responsive institution that can respond effectively to these challenges. Various perspectives on how the university can become a learning organization are discussed. Central to the discussion is the need to change the university culture in ways that encourage and nurture more interdisciplinary programs and problem-focused teams that address the needs of communities. It is suggested that culture change is also necessary to encourage the development of new types of learning environments that nurture the spirit and the mind. Future business organizations are then compared with the university. A key issue that needs to be considered is how universities can better prepare students for the work settings of tomorrow. It is suggested that such preparation requires environments that help students adapt to change and encourage them to become lifelong learners.     

Parent Involvement in Early Intervention for Disadvantaged Children: Does It Matter?

This study investigated the association between parent involvement in early intervention and children's later school competence. Parents (N = 704) of children participating in the Chicago Longitudinal Study were interviewed retrospectively about their school involvement in preschool and kindergarten. Parents reported on the activities in which they participated and their frequency of program participation. Results indicated that even after controlling for family background, the number of activities in which parents participated in preschool and kindergarten was significantly associated with higher reading achievement, with lower rates of grade retention at age 14 (eighth grade), and with fewer years in special education. The frequency of parent involvement was only marginally associated with reading achievement but was associated with lower rates of grade retention and fewer years in special education. A confirmatory analysis indicated that teacher ratings of parent involvement in first and second grade were significantly associated with higher reading achievement in eighth grade, lower grade retention rates, and lower rates of special education placement through eighth grade. Findings support the benefits of parent involvement in early childhood programs.