Search

Commentary on the papers of the special issue identifies and discusses four themes: 1) strategies to bridge the gap between science and practice, 2) sources of community science questions of interest, 3) choice and quality of methods, and 4) epistemology and useful language for community science. The commentary identifies some limitations in the models proposed by the special issue authors, and proposes renewed attention to ecology, context and process in community change initiatives, calling for a common set of community level measures as one strategy to advance a community centered science agenda.

The purpose of this paper is to apply an ecological perspective to the conduct of multilevel community-based culturally-situated interventions. After a discussion of the emerging consensus about the value of approaching such interventions ecologically, the paper outlines a series of questions stimulated by an ecological perspective that can guide further theory development in conducting multilevel interventions. These questions all derive from the importance of assessing the local community ecology where the intervention occurs. The paper concludes with a series of topics which, taken together, provide a roadmap for further conceptual development of multilevel interventions as vehicles for long-range community impact.

In this paper, I offer reflections as someone from outside the United States about the Swampscott conference. I refer to Fryer and Fox's (The Community Psychologist, 24, 2014, 1) critique of the "Swampscott discourse" and its role in fixing the birthplace of community psychology. While the critique is important, I note the growing references to international community psychology and the need to view the discipline as a product of social political realities in different contexts, as well as dynamics of dominance and marginality in knowledge production in psychology. The work in the Global South presents opportunities to contribute to developing a decolonizing community psychology through expanding the ecology of knowledge.

This special issue of the American Journal of Community Psychology is the result of a 18-year partnership with Alaska Native communities using collaborative field based research methods. Its goal is to provide a case study fulfilling the spirit of ecological inquiry, offering a detailed and nuanced description of a community intervention. The articles describe the nature of our work, including some of our successes, as well as challenges, dilemmas, and even disappointments we experienced along the way. Our primary aim was to develop and assess the feasibility of a complex, multi-level intervention to increase protective factors hypothesized to reduce suicide and alcohol abuse among rural Yup’ik Alaska Native youth ages 12 to 18. The articles that follow include descriptions of the cultural context, relevant literature and project history, our methods of community engagement in measurement development strategies, an empirical test of the prevention model that guided the intervention, the development and implementation of the intervention, a feasibility and impact assessment, and an evaluation of community engagement. A final article summarizes what is generalizable from the work in field based intervention research with rural and culturally distinct populations, and future prospects for decolonizing community intervention research methods. These papers raise important issues, including (1) need for deep, contextual ecological descriptions, (2) reconceptualization of time in the research relationship, (3) distinctions between populations and communities, and (4) the conflict between values of communities and intervention science.

Acculturation to the culture of the host society as well as to one's heritage culture have been shown to impact immigrants' adjustment during the years following resettlement. While acculturation has been identified as an important factor in adjustment of Vietnamese immigrants (Birman and Tran in Am J Orthopsychiatr 78(1):109-120. doi: 10.1037/0002-9432.78.1.109 , 2008), no clear pattern of findings has emerged and too few studies have employed an ecological approach. The purpose of this paper is to contextualize the study of acculturation and adjustment by taking an ecological approach to exploring these relationships across several life domains, using a bilinear scale, and examining mediators of these relationships for adult Vietnamese refugees (N = 203) in the United States. We call this approach the Ecological Acculturation Framework (EAF). Results of a structural equation model (SEM) showed that job satisfaction fully mediated the relationship between American acculturation and psychological distress, demonstrating that this relationship was specific to an occupational domain. However, while Vietnamese acculturation predicted co-ethnic social support satisfaction, it did not predict reduced psychological distress. Implications for a life domains approach, including domain specificity, are discussed.

The concept of social capital is becoming increasingly common in community psychology and elsewhere. However, the multiple conceptual and operational definitions of social capital challenge its utility as a theoretical tool. The goals of this paper are to clarify two forms of social capital (bridging and bonding), explicitly link them to the structural characteristics of small world networks, and explore the behavioral and ecological prerequisites of its formation. First, I use the tools of network science and specifically the concept of small-world networks to clarify what patterns of social relationships are likely to facilitate social capital formation. Second, I use an agent-based model to explore how different ecological characteristics (diversity and segregation) and behavioral tendencies (homophily and proximity) impact communities’ potential for developing social capital. The results suggest diverse communities have the greatest potential to develop community social capital, and that segregation moderates the effects that the behavioral tendencies of homophily and proximity have on community social capital. The discussion highlights how these findings provide community-based researchers with both a deeper understanding of the contextual constraints with which they must contend, and a useful tool for targeting their efforts in communities with the greatest need or greatest potential.

In this paper we address the pervasive tendency in community psychology to treat values like social justice only as general objectives rather than contested theoretical concepts possessing identifiable empirical content. First we discuss how distinctive concepts of social justice have figured in three major intellectual traditions within community psychology: (1) the prevention and health promotion tradition, (2) the empowerment tradition, and most recently, (3) the critical tradition. We point out the epistemological gains and limitations of these respective concepts and argue for greater sensitivity to the context dependency of normative concepts like social justice. More specifically, we point to a pressing need in community psychology for an epistemology that: (1) subsumes both descriptive and evaluative concepts, and (2) acknowledges its own embeddedness in history and culture without thereby reducing all knowledge claims to the status of ideology. Finally, we describe and demonstrate the promise of what we are calling a social ecological epistemology for fulfilling this need.

One distinctive approach to community psychology intervention research involves finding ways to contribute to the development of communities. Ecological inquiry is a primary theoretical framework for this work. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the spirit of ecological inquiry may be expressed in the descriptions of how we design, conduct, and evaluate community interventions. We first elaborate a set of criteria as a heuristic framework for carrying out and documenting community intervention writing, theory, and action. We then pilot the application of these criteria to explore the presence of an ecological emphasis within intervention studies published in the AJCP between 1994 and 2002. This exercise helped illuminate the extent to which an ecological perspective is reflected in intervention accounts, and select intervention accounts that reflect a substantial ecological emphasis are described. Further, this review highlights the areas of our written work which contain fewer makers of ecological inquiry, as with the relevant exclusion of citizens in formative intervention roles. We conclude with a series of reflections about constraints on published intervention accounts and recommendations for those interested in furthering the spirit of ecological inquiry through their research and action commitments to community development.

This paper proposes common mechanisms to explain the effects of adversities and of resources that promote resilience. Adversities threaten the satisfaction of basic human needs and the acquisitions of competencies to carry out valued social roles. Adversities can also be characterized in terms of their ecological properties of occurrence in time, and place. Resilience resources at the individual, microsystem and macro levels reduce the negative effects of adversities through their effects on satisfaction of basic human needs and their effects on the occurrence of adversities. The effects of resilience resources are described as preventive, protective and promotive. Implications are presented for the development of interventions to promote resilience.