Strengthening underprivileged communities: Strengths-based approaches as a force for positive social change in community development

Abstract

Positive psychology came about to redress the perceived imbalance in the focus of the psychology endeavour, which was perceived to be unduly weighted towards the negative side of human experience, with insufficient experience being paid to the positive. This nascent discipline was originally conceptualised as having three pillars of focus, namely, positive subjective experience (e.g. happiness), positive personal characteristics (e.g. strengths) and positive institutions (e.g. schools, organisations, communities that in some way applied the principles of positive psychology (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.