Facilitating Change: Where and How Should Community Psychology Intervene?

Abstract

Struggles over where and how to facilitate social change have remained central to the field of community psychology since its birth in 1965. Difficult issues within the field, ranging from debates over empowerment vs prevention, to the challenges of culturally relevant intervention and the facilitation of community-wide change, all can be linked back to the two central questions of where and how. Community psychologists' answers to these questions over the past 25 yrs reveal much about the values, assumptions, and practices of the field. The early successes of the field have laid the groundwork for increasingly sophisticated approaches in 3 areas: understanding how culture and context influence social interventions, expanding the scope and targets of intervention, and developing methods for understanding contextual change. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)