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Perkins, D.D. (2009). The death of community psychology (& the development of
community research & action) in the United States: Issues of theoretical,
methodological, & practical diversity. In C. Vazquez Rivera, D. Perez Jimenez, M.
Figueroa Rodriguez, & W. Pacheco Bou (Eds.), International Community Psychology:
Shared Agendas in Diversity. (pp. 285-314). San Juan, PR: Actividades de Formacion
Comunitaria.
The Death of Community Psychology (and the Development of
Community Research and Action) in the United States:
Issues of Theoretical, Methodological and Practical Diversity
Douglas D. Perkins1
Vanderbilt University
Abstract
I will take an historical perspective in
discussing the relevance to community
psychology of other social science and applied
professional disciplines. I will argue for the
need for community psychologists to consider,
adapt, and test (1) theories and research
methods from urban, rural, and community
sociology, social
and
environmental
psychology, geography, anthropology, and
policy research, and (2) intervention
approaches from community organizing and
development, organizational change, urban and
regional planning, health promotion, social
work, law and justice. I will conclude with an
argument
that as
community
psychology's viability within, and influence
on, the broader field of psychology in the U.S.
diminishes over time, the transdisciplinary and
international
opportunities and
reality
of community research and action outside of
academic psychology have never been better.
1
This paper is based on the opening keynote address presented to the 1st
International Community Psychology Conference, San Juan, Puerto Rico, June 8,
2006. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
d.perkins@vanderbilt.edu
The death of community psychology (and the development of
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Resumen
En este trabajo desarrollo una perspectiva
historica sobre la discussion acerca de la
relevancia de la psicologia comunitaria en
otras ciencias sociales y disciplinas
profesionales aplicadas. Argumento acerca de
la necesidad de los psicologos y psicologas
comunitarios de considerar, adaptar, y probar
a) las teorias y metodos de investigacion de la
sociologia comunitaria urbana y rural, y b) los
acercamientos para la intervencion en la
organizacion y desarrollo communitario, el
cambio organizacional, la planificacion urbana
y regional, la promocion de la salud, el trabajo
social, el derecho y la justicia. Concluyo con
una argumentacion en el sentido de que en la
medida en que la viabilidad e influencia de la
psicologia comunitaria, dentro del campo
general de psicologia en los EU disminuye
con el paso del tiempo, las opertunidades
transdisciplinarias e internacionales y la
realidad de la investigacion y accion
comunitaria fuera de la academia nunca han
sido mehores.
Historical Influences on the Development of Community
Psychology in the USA
Community psychology in the United States has had a split
personality since its very beginnings. Because the widely recognized
seminal event held in Swampscott, Massachusettes, in 1965 had as its
original purpose to plan the training of psychologists in response to the
community mental health centers act (Anderson et al., 1966), it is often
claimed, and generally assumed, that the roots of community
psychology lie solely or primarily in the expansion of clinical
psychology and the deinstitutionalization of people with serious mental
illness.
In fact, however, conferees at Swampscott and at three later
conferences in Austin, Texas, made clear that interdisciplinary training
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in community psychology was to be a high priority (Mann, 1978).
Community psychology has been greatly influenced by theories,
research methods, and intervention approaches from other areas of
psychology, particularly social, organizational, and environmental, and
from outside psychology.
Long before a psychology of community developed, there
existed a substantial body of literature on particular communities and
into the nature and contexts of community and social change, in
general, in rural and urban sociology, anthropology, law and political
science, education, urban planning and applied economics. For
community psychology to ignore these rich sources of theory, methods,
and data inhibits interdisciplinary collaboration simply from ignorance
and would doom us to try to reinvent many wheels and to repeat the
mistakes of the past.
Table 1 presents many of the historical influences on the
development of community psychology in the U.S. and takes a longer
view than is typical in historical accounts of our field. The
demarcation of time into decades is admittedly arbitrary and the
perceived threats, societal responses, and influential disciplines and
authors I have identified are no doubt debatable and most definitely
incomplete. But I simply hope that it sparks some deeper consideration
of the many diverse social and political movements, disciplines, and
theorists, researchers, and practitioners who have influenced the
development of community studies in the United States and beyond.
The rise of Evolution theory in the 19th century and subsequent
concerns about genetically “inferior” human populations by eugenicists
around the 1880s may seem like a strange place to start, but the
revolution Darwin started in biology was critical to the emergence and
development of ecology and its continued relevance to understanding
natural processes in human communities and habitats. The
discriminatory methods and goals of Social Darwinists-- both early
psychometricians and the later political leaders who used, and were
influenced by, them—also provide us with a still-relevant cautionary
tale about the dangers of drawing conclusions about groups based on
the study of individual differences and also the need for scientists to
remain alert to the misinterpretation and misapplication of their data.
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The 1890s saw the birth of Psychology and, in particular
Freud’s recognition of the unconscious, anxiety disorders, and neurotic
tendencies in all of us not only was a response to Victorian era psychosocial repression, but suggested that insanity is more of a continuum
than a discrete and insular condition. And so perhaps the most
important reasons to include Freud and psychoanalysis in this history is
that they burst the “otherness”, or “us-them”, myth of mental illness
and ushered in an era of Liberalism that affected all the social sciences,
art, literature and society at large.
Around the turn of the last century and prior to the First World
War, the perceived threats to democracy in the U.S. were primarily
domestic rather than foreign and were principally the dual problems of
illiteracy and immorality. Universal public education was the policy
response and the philosophical movement in response to both threats
was known as Pragmatism. Pragmatism’s most influential thinkers and
authors were William James (James & Gunn, 2000) and John Dewey
(1888, 1909, 1916), who also happened to be, arguably, cofounders of
psychology in the U.S. and so are early role models of
interdisciplinarity. For his social theories focusing on the role of
education in democracy and the development of civic responsibility
and civil society (or what we might today call “social capital”), Dewey
is an especially important figure for community psychology, but the
degree to which his influential and forward-looking ideas have been
ignored in community psychology suggests he is unfortunately viewed
as from antiquity or another discipline.
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Table 1
Historical Influences on the Development of Community Psychology in the U.S.
Decade:
Perceived Threat
Societal Response:
Influential Discipline/Authors:
1880s
Genetic “inferiors”
Social Darwinism
Biology, Ecology/Darwin
1890s
Victorian repression
Liberalism
Psychology/Freud
1900s
Illiteracy, immorality
Pragmatism, democracy
Philosophy, Education, History/Dewey, James, Du Bois
1910s
Immigrants
Settlement houses
Social work/Addams
1920s
Industrial urbanism
Chicago School
Sociology, Inst.-Human Relations/Park, Burgess, McKenzie,
Wirth, Lynd, G.H.Mead
1930s
Economic depression,
Fascism
New Deal
Economics, Sociology/Keynes;Weber; Durkheim
1940s
World War, genocide
Globalism
Interdisciplinary, Research Ctr. for Group Dynamics/Lewin,
Warner, Whyte, M.Mead, Jahoda, Hobbs
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Table 1 (Cont.)
Historical Influences on the Development of Community Psychology in the U.S.
Decade:
Perceived Threat
Societal Response:
Influential Discipline/Authors:
1950s
Legal racism
Civil Rights
Law, Social Psych & Poli.Sci./Clark, Chein & Cook; Hunter;
Long
1960s
Institutions, poverty
Change conditions (CMH,
Great Society, Head Start)
Community Dev., Policy, Planning, Eco psych/Swampscott,
Alinsky, Biddle, Gans, Sarason, Zigler, Kelly, Barker, Moos,
Albee
1970s
Reactive Medical Model Prevention
Public health, developmental & environmental psych/Cowen,
Dohrenwend, Levine, Newbrough, Altman, Proshansky,
Bronfenbrenner, Stokols
1980s
Oppression
Empowerment
Political sociology, Org. Studies/Rappaport, Argyris, Bellah,
Heller, Cherniss, Keys, Serrano-Garcia, Zimmerman
1990s
Class/race/sex/cultural
hegemony
Human/method Diversity,
Strengths, Globalism
Anthropology, Eco methods/(Bourdieu, Flyvbjerg, Freire),
Riger, Shinn
Technological innovation
Bio, redux/ (CP w/in Psych in flux, shrinking)
Interdisciplinarity (to
integrate all the above)
Transdisciplinary eco-psycho-political action-research/
Stokols, Maton, Saegert, Watts, Prilleltensky, Speer
2 current/ 1. Disease
future
directions: 2. Simplistic
reductionism
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The work of W.E.B. Du Bois (1898, 1903) does not fit quite
as neatly into the Pragmatists’ concerns with illiteracy, immorality,
and the promotion of education, and democracy, but, like Dewey,
he is too essential as an early applied interdisciplinarian to ignore.
After a degree from Fisk College, he became the first Black to
graduate from Harvard University with a Bachelor’s, Master’s, and
a Ph.D. in history. But his approach to history evolved to address
contemporary race and related social problems from a blend of
political, economic, and sociological perspectives. He could just as
easily fit into the 1880s’ concern with genetic “inferiors” or the
later decades’ foci on immigrants, Fascism, racism, poverty,
oppression, or cultural hegemony (discussed below).
World War I and the Russian Revolution may have been the
biggest global events of the 1910s, but in the U.S., a major concern
during that decade and in fact almost constantly from the 1870s
through today’s headlines has been immigration. U.S. society’s
most constructive response (i.e., as opposed to the shameful,
discriminatory policies of the U.S. government and the aforementioned practices of testing psychologists) was the settlement
house movement. The field of social work developed during this
period and Jane Addams’ (1910) work at Hull House in Chicago
became a model for similar, mostly private, community-based
institutions for the instrumental support, acculturation, and
ultimately the political organization of millions of urban
immigrants and other disadvantaged populations.
In the 1920s, there was growing recognition, interest, and
concern about the problems associated with industrial urbanism,
such as crime, unsafe and unhealthy working and living conditions,
and high rates of health and social problems in America’s rapidly
growing cities. The field of community sociology, starting with
Ferdinand Tönnies in the late 1800s (1955; original: 1887), is
probably the greatest source of relevant theory and empirical work
for community psychology. Two important institutions in the
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1920s were the University of Chicago’s famed “Chicago School”
of sociology, which was instrumental in developing urban
community sociology in the U.S. (Park, Burgess, McKenzie, &
Wirth, 1925; Mead & Morris, 1934), and the Institute on Human
Relations at Yale University, about which I will say more later.
Early sociological studies of smaller towns and rural areas should
also not be ignored (for example, the longitudinal Middletown
study; Lynd & Lynd, 1929).
In the 1930s, the dual global threats were, first, economic
depression and then the rise of Fascism. President Franklin
Roosevelt’s response to the former was the New Deal and, while
the official U.S. response to the latter was isolationism, the “Old
Left” Progressive political movements gained widespread support
among workers and unionists in reaction to international Fascism,
the Spanish Civil War, and brutish Capitalist abuses at home.
Although Max Weber’s and Emile Durkheim’s greatest impact in
founding sociology as a discipline was much earlier, they had a
particularly strong influence on American social theory and
research during the ‘30s through English translations of works such
as The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (Weber, 1930)
and The division of labor in society (Durkheim, 1933). In
economics, John Maynard Keynes, a founder of modern
macroeconomics, wrote his influential 1936 book, General Theory
of Employment, Interest and Money, which challenged the
prevailing free-market economic paradigm. Keynes advocated
activist government fiscal policy to stimulate demand to mitigate
high unemployment and related effects of economic depression and
recession, by vast spending on public works, a fairly radical idea at
the time. This provided FDR with the justification he needed for
his interventionist economic policies.
The chief evils of the 1940s were, of course, World War and
genocide. It is horribly ironic that both the eugenics “solution”
used by the Nazis and the military solution used by the White
House, in both cases with the aid of science, involved the “state-
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sponsored terrorism” of its day—i.e, the mass murder of civilians
(by highly systematic extermination on the one hand and nuclear
annihilation on the other). The international solution to those
“solutions” and to war was Globalism, in the form of the U.N. and
of other, more expedient pacts based on security, ideology, and
markets. Socially constructive interdisciplinary studies by Kurt
Lewin (1946; 1948), Lloyd Warner (Warner & Lunt, 1942),
William Foote Whyte (1946), Margaret Mead (1951), Nicholas
Hobbs (1948), and others were a hopeful sign in this otherwise
grim period. The influence of World War II on the practice and
study of mental health has been well documented. But less well
remembered perhaps were Lewin’s Research Center for Group
Dynamics at M.I.T. and research on the effects of racial and
religious prejudice and discrimination by social and developmental
psychologists in New York City and elsewhere. This and the two
decades to follow were the heyday of socially relevant social
psychology (Gergen, 1973). (Sadly, as an aside, if the title “the
Death of Community Psychology” is an exaggeration, I fear the
death of social psychology over the past two or three decades is all
too real, at least in the U.S.)
In the 1950s, the major threat was legal racism, and
society’s response was the Civil Rights movement. Although the
social and political movement was led largely by the faith
community and its leadership, actual change was led by the courts
and instrumental in those decisions were collaborations among
activist lawyers and psychologists, including those alluded to
above, such as Kenneth Clark, Isidor Chein, and Stuart Cook
(1952/2004), and Marie Jahoda (1949; Jahoda & Ackerman, 1947).
Also noteworthy in the 1950s was the community-focused political
sociology of Floyd Hunter (1953) and Norton Long (1958).
The seminal events, influences, and authors in community
psychology in the U.S. starting in the 1960s should be more
familiar. Two of the great threats were the social ills resulting from
large bureaucratic institutions (particularly psychiatric hospitals
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and prisons) and from poverty. The new solutions proposed by
Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and echoed by the newly selfidentified community psychologists, were to change the
community conditions underlying poverty and many social and
mental health problems and to bring mental health and other social
services and early intervention programs like Head Start
permanently into every community where they are needed.1 As
was explicitly recognized at the Swampscott conference in 1965,
psychologists needed to collaborate with and psychology graduate
training needed to include many other disciplines, especially
applied ones such as community development, public policy,
program development, administration, and evaluation, urban
planning, and applied economics, as well as ecological psychology
(Anderson et al., 1966). Even the critique of institutionalized
mental health care which led to the community mental health
movement was largely leveled from outside of psychology by
authors such as Erving Goffman (1961), Thomas Szasz (1961),
Thomas Scheff (1966), Leo Srole (1962), David Mechanic (1966),
and others. Some of the key authors for community psychology
both in and outside psychology during this decade and earlier were
Saul Alinsky (1946), William Biddle (1965), Herbert Gans (1968),
Jane Jacobs (1961), Daniel P. Moynihan (1969), Lee Rainwater
(Rainwater & Yancey, 1967), and of course, Seymour Sarason
(1966), James G. Kelly (1966), Roger Barker (1968), and George
Albee (Albee & Dickey, 1957).
As the thrust of change and solutions in the 1960s were very
1
The different societal responses to perceived threats identified in each decade from the
1960s through the 1990s (changing community conditions, prevention, empowerment,
and strengths) are in bold as they have provided core principles for community
psychology. Prilleltensky and colleagues abbreviate the four principles as “SPEC” for
an action-research project called New SPECs which aims to transform human service
organizations to change the ways they operate both internally and externally to
emphasize Strengths over deficits, Prevention over treatment, Empowerment over
expert-driven processes, and changing Community conditions over changing
individuals.
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political, it is interesting that, despite the late Speaker of the U.S.
House of Representatives Tip O’Neill’s famous maxim that “all
politics is local,” political science at the community level has been
more difficult to find. There had developed socio-legal theories of
community (Friedrich, 1959). Janowitz (1961), Gamson (1966; in
sociology), Putnam (1966), and others had begun to develop a
political science of communities, but it has received little attention
in community psychology. An historical perspective would have
led community psychologists to Alexis de Tocqueville’s (1835)
writings on communitarian democracy in America, as it did
sociologist Robert Bellah (1985) and his colleagues. This is why
the kind of historical analysis of community settings, such as that
of Levine and Levine (1970) is so important but all too rare.
In the 1970s, there was increased recognition of the
limitations of community mental health in the form of the reactive
therapeutic Medical Model, even when it is community-based.
Most community psychologists were still not ready to give up on
the medical model, however. So the major response was to
develop and improve new approaches to prevention. Very helpful
outside fields included public health, and developmental and
environmental psychology. Some of the key authors included
Emory Cowen (1977), Barbara Dohrenwend (1978), Murray
Levine (Levine & Levine, 1970), J.R. Newbrough (1973), Irwin
Altman (1975), Harold Proshansky (1972), Urie Bronfenbrenner
(1979), and Dan Stokols (1976).
In the 1980s, the central threat was defined in various ways,
but may be summarized as oppression. And the proposed solution
was a whole new paradigm for community psychological theory,
research and application: empowerment. Other important fields
included political sociology and organizational studies. Key
authors include organizational behaviorist Chris Argyris (Argyris,
Putnam & Smith, 1985; whose relevant work actually extends from
the 1950s to at least 2000), social worker Barbara Solomon (1976),
sociologists Bellah (1985) and Peter Berger (Berger & Neuhaus,
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1977), and within community psychology, Julian Rappaport
(1981), Ken Heller (1989), Cary Cherniss (1991), Chris Keys
(Keys & Frank, 1987), Irma Serrano-Garcia (1984), and Marc
Zimmerman (Zimmerman & Rappaport, 1988).2 Community
psychologists in the U.S. are justifiably proud of their extensive
theoretical elaboration and research on the concept and importance
of empowerment (Hoffman, 1978; Rappaport, 1981) to the point of
adopting it as one of (unfortunately) very few core guiding
principles for the field (Perkins & Zimmerman, 1995; Rappaport,
1981). But, of course, the roots of empowerment theory can be
found in Black social work (Solomon, 1976) and political
sociology (Berger & Neuhaus, 1977).
In 1987, Beth Shinn called for an expansion of community
psychology's domain of inquiry and action beyond traditional
mental health settings to more fully understand and apply
prevention and empowerment in such behavior settings (Barker,
1968) as schools, workplace, religious settings, voluntary
associations, and government. This of course requires
interdisciplinary training and collaboration.
Identifying the most prominent perceived threat to society
during the last decade is very challenging—there are so many to
choose from. But I selected all the myriad problems associated
with hegemony on the basis of class, race, sex, sexual preference,
and culture. The solutions are equally difficult to summarize, but as
I see it they revolve around recognizing, celebrating and
developing all the strengths associated with diversity, and not just
global human and cultural diversity, but also the strengths in
methodological diversity, on which community psychology has
made some recent progress but still has far to go and represents
tremendous potential for our field. Nonpsychologists with
2
With each successive decade it gets harder and harder to not mention other important
authors, so please accept that these lists are merely those who occurred to me first but
are by no means intended as an exhaustive list.
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important perspectives for this agenda include Pierre Bourdieu
(1985), Bent Flyvbjerg (1998), and Paolo Freire (1970). (The
parentheses around their names in Table 1 merely indicate that
their influence on community psychology and U.S. social thought
in general is perhaps recommended more than it reflects reality).
Within community psychology, two authors I would highlight here
are Stephanie Riger (1992; 1993) for her work on gender issues and
epistemology and Beth Shinn for her interdisciplinary work on
homelessness (1992) and on organizational and institutional
impacts on people (1987; Shinn & Toohey, 2003), and her
continued leadership on issues of ecological and multi-level
assessment methods (Shinn & Rapkin, 2000).
The relevance of cultural anthropology toward the goal of
diversity is clear. Yet it is hard to find much past influence of
anthropological knowledge and methods on community
psychology even though, in cultural anthropology, studies of nonWestern communities by Margaret Mead (1928), Clifford Geertz
(1963), and others have been widely available for decades. The
development of applied rural and urban anthropology, with ties to
community development programs around the world and in the
U.S., developed more recently on a parallel track to community
psychology (Eddy & Partridge, 1978), but we are still too ignorant
of that and all the other disciplines I’ve mentioned, both scientific
and applied.
As the above history of community studies across multiple
disciplines suggests, psychology was relatively late to discover the
community as a setting for social research and action. All of these
precursors to community psychology in other disciplines were
available and, based on the Swampscott and Austin conference
reports, largely known to the founders of our field. Why then has it
taken so long to seriously and systematically reach out to those
disciplines?
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This question is even harder to fathom when one considers
that, unlike traditional psychology’s preoccupation with the
intrapsychic life and behavioral health of individuals, the focus of
community psychology has been on the development and study of
interventions to ameliorate the lives of people in the many diverse
settings in which we live, work, play, pray, go to school, and seek
help. Granted, sociology and anthropology have not always been
very applied; and economics, although largely applied, is
sufficiently different from community psychology in terms of
levels of analysis, theory, and methodology that collaboration
between the two fields has been rare. But community psychology
has much to learn from all the above fields about how to design and
evaluate prevention programs; consult with self-help groups,
community organizations, schools, and public and private human
service agencies; and analyze policies. It must do these applied
activities with sensitivity and understanding about larger social
structures and dynamics, cultural diversity, political and economic
considerations, and the physical environmental context.
Community psychology has often been criticized by both
insiders and outsiders as lacking a clear theoretical, empirical, or
professional definition and identity. Thus another argument for
incorporating more interdisciplinary work into community
psychology is to create a new and more distinct niche for the field
as focusing on community-based research on social behavior at
multiple levels of analysis. We can look to several past and current
interdisciplinary institutions and programs as exemplars.
Interdisciplinary Institutions and Programs
Throughout the past century, prominent examples of
interdisciplinary social science programs could be found at several
of the best universities in the U.S. Perhaps the first and most
prominent was Yale’s Institute of Human Relations, founded in the
1920s as an interdisciplinary program to research and teach the
culture, behavior, politics, and economics of societies worldwide
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and promote Yale's influence on the “New World Order.” Its
advisory committee, which was controlled by the Skull and Bones
Society, included social reformer Jane Addams, John Dewey,
college presidents James Angell (Yale; a psychologist and former
student and colleague of Dewey), Robert Hutchins (Chicago),
Frank Aydelotte (Swarthmore), James Kirkland (Vanderbilt), and
Ray Wilbur (Stanford), anthropologist Franz Boas, theologian
Henry Sloane Coffin, psychologist Lewis Terman, Secretary of
State and Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes,
newsmen Walter Lippmann and Adolph Ochs, William Mayo
(cofounder of the Mayo Clinic), psychiatrist Adolph Meyer,
sociologist Edward Ross, economist Edwin Seligman, as well as
many high-level government and business officials. Such a group
reminds us that the great importance of interdisciplinary programs
is in the coming together of different people and the powerful
synergies of their different ideas and influences.
The Institute of Human Relations likely inspired others,
such as its successor at Yale, the interdisciplinary Institution for
Social and Policy Studies, whose faculty included Seymour
Sarason, and the University of Chicago’s Committee on Human
Development, founded in 1940 with faculty from education,
sociology, anthropology, and (in 1946) psychology (with Carl
Rogers). The latter program, claiming to be the oldest
interdisciplinary graduate program in social research, currently
offers Ph.D.s in life course development, personality, emotions and
psychopathology, cross cultural studies, biosocial psychology, and
clinical psychology. Another famous interdisciplinary program
existed at Harvard from 1946-1972, when social, developmental,
and personality/clinical psychology were separated from
experimental psychology and joined sociology and social
anthropology to create the Department of Social Relations. Other
long-time, interdisciplinary programs in human ecology and social
policy can be found at Northwestern and Cornell Universities.
Dewey was a major intellectual influence on, not only the
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above programs at Yale and Chicago, but also two others more
closely related to community psychology. Social psychology at the
University of Michigan is historically connected to the Research
Center for Group Dynamics, which was founded by Kurt Lewin
and is now part of the Institute for Social Research. Current
interdisciplinary graduate programs at Michigan include culture
and cognition, evolution and human adaptation, organizational
studies, prevention research, survey methods, social work and
psychology, and women’s studies and psychology. The longstanding community program at Vanderbilt University is in
Peabody College of Education and Human Development and was
heavily influenced by Dewey’s ideas. In 2001 it changed its name
to Community Research and Action and moved from Psychology
to a new interdisciplinary department (Human and Organizational
Development).
Two other noteworthy programs are more environmentally
focused. One of the largest interdisciplinary academic units is the
program at the University of California at Irvine which has grown
into the School of Social Ecology, which combines social,
behavioral, legal, environmental, and health scientists. As it has
grown, it has avoided dividing by discipline as each of its four
departments (Criminology, Law and Society; Environmental
Health, Science and Policy; Psychology and Social Behavior; and
Planning, Policy, and Design) is also interdisciplinary. The
doctoral program in Environmental Psychology (or Environmental
Social Science) at the Graduate Center of the City University of
New York “addresses the social, cultural, psychological and
political issues involved in the production, use, design, and
occupation of space, place, and nature… [I]nterests (include)
public space, children's environments, housing and homelessness,
participatory design and evaluation, and work environments. This
field draws on work in a number of disciplines including
anthropology, geography, sociology, psychology, history, political
science, planning, architecture, and urban design” (website).
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One implication of the above programs is that they seem to
represent new interdisciplinary fields, each focusing on one or
more particular problem areas, e.g., human, organizational, or
community development, crime, health, environmental design. In
health and social science alone, there is a rapidly growing number
of interdisciplinary research and training programs that are at the
cutting edge of solving even more specific health problems, such as
cardiovascular disease, depression, wellness, aging, and HIV
prevention (Kessel, Rosenfield & Anderson, 2003).
The Future of Community Psychology
Finally to the bottom of the table and two possible current
and future directions: The first defines the main threat as disease
and the primary societal response is reliance on technological
innovation. The leading disciplinary influences bring us back to
where I started, that is biology, albeit very complex and
advanced—i.e., neuroscience, pharmacology, etc. As I see it,
community psychology’s potential contribution to this agenda is to
continue to develop Dohrenwend’s (1978) elaborated, ecological
psychosocial stress model (see Figure 1).
Our sub-discipline within psychology has been in flux,
however, and I membership in the U.S. has been shrinking rather
than expanding. And so I propose a second, alternative direction,
which defines the problem as simplistic scientific reductionism and
the solution as interdisciplinarity, or better still, transdisciplinary
eco-psycho-political action-research (to integrate all the historical
influences and potential influences I have discussed and on which I
will elaborate in the final section below). Some of the key authors
in this direction are Dan Stokols (2006), Ken Maton (Maton,
Perkins & Saegert, 2006), Susan Saegert (Saegert & Winkel, 1996),
The death of community psychology (and the development of
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302
Rod Watts (Watts, Williams & Jagers, 2003), Isaac Prilleltensky
(2001), and Paul Speer (et al., 2003).
Thus the key questions we face as a field of research and
practice are: Can community psychology survive in the future
within departments and organizations of psychology? Or should it
become a more truly interdisciplinary field (“community research
and action”)? And what are the possible costs and benefits of each
of those alternative courses?
Conclusion
In conclusion, the title of this address, “The death of
community psychology in the United States,” may be an alarmist
exaggeration—I hope it is—but as the first generation of
community psychologists retire and graduate programs shrink or
close, the field is getting more marginalized even in U.S.
psychology departments (where it still exists at all) and we are in
grave danger of attritting out of existence. What we desperately
need is a new paradigm for theory, research, and intervention, as
well as undergraduate recruitment and graduate training. I believe
that paradigm must continue to attract students, faculty, and
practitioners from psychology, but also much more actively and
successfully involve collaborators from many other disciplines in
central and meaningful ways. And I further believe this new,
transdisciplinary paradigm should emphasize our strengths in
action research while developing our theoretical and
methodological limitations, for which the other disciplines will
provide new ideas, methods, and expertise. The new paradigm
could be built around a framework of ecological and, to use Isaac
Prilleltensky’s phrase, “psychopolitical” validity.
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Prilleltensky and Nelson (1997) identify social justice as an
historical value in community psychology and call for the field to
move from a paradigm based on reforming existing structures to
ameliorate symptomatic problems toward one that challenges the
status quo by addressing underlying structural issues of power,
oppression, and liberation. They point to critical psychology as a
potential source of analytical insights to help community
psychology reclaim its original values and work to fundamentally
transform oppressive institutions and community conditions. To
make such a grand vision a reality, however, requires careful
consideration of the specific ecological contexts of each problem at
different levels of analysis and intervention, and of how change
occurs over time. For that, critical theory and our allied subdisciplines of psychology deserve more attention, but more
importantly, we must look beyond psychology to the various
applied social sciences, each with vast bodies of literature and
methods of analyzing the operation of power—in all its diverse
forms, structures, and systems at the community, institutional, and
societal levels.
In response to this vision, Christens and Perkins (in press),
borrowing from Prilleltensky (in press), propose a comprehensive
framework for interdisciplinary community research and action in
three dimensions (see Figure 2). The first dimension examines
oppression, liberation, and wellness as stages of empowerment-- a
dynamic process over time. The goal is to identify sources of
oppression and help oppressed groups become liberated which
leads to social, material, physical, and spiritual wellness. Theories,
research, and practices in human, organizational and community
development may be useful.
The second dimension includes the various levels of
analysis and intervention, including the individual psychobehavioral and micro-system, the group/organizational and mesosystem, and the community/societal or exo- and macro-system
levels (Bronfenbrenner, 1979).
The death of community psychology (and the development of
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304
The third dimension encompasses four environmental or
substantive domains that are all essential for understanding the
ecology of oppression, liberation, and wellness. It is these
environmental domains which most clearly imply a need for
transdisciplinary research to adequately understand the economic,
political, socio-cultural (psychology, sociology, and anthropology),
and physical (environmental planning and design research;
environmental psychology, environmental sociology,
environmental law and economics, and environmental and
development policy) contexts of community disadvantage, power,
and wellness at each level and stage.
This framework has been used in a proposal by
Prilleltensky, Perkins and Fisher (2003) for an international
research network on power dynamics in community settings across
these same levels and domains. They have posed the following
questions for each stage (or column) of the process:
Think about your research and/or intervention
interests or a project you have worked on & consider
the following Questions related to oppression:
The following questions need to be repeated for the 3
levels of analysis and can be applied to any one of the
4 environmental domains…
What are the power relations present at the macro,
meso, and micro levels of analysis? Who are the
players in the relationship? There may be multiple
relationships at play. Some players may be
oppressors in one setting and oppressed in others.
What exchanges take place over time among the
various players at the various levels?...
What are the consequences of these power relations
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La Muerte de la Psicologia Communitaria en los Estados Unidos:
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at the various levels of analysis?...
Questions related to liberation/empowerment:
We are conceptualizing liberation and
empowerment as a process. This process may be
naturally occurring in the environment, without
external intervention, or it may be the result of a
planned intervention.
1. What strategies are being implemented at each
level of analysis to change the oppressive power
relations?...
2. What inhibiting and facilitative factors influence
the strategies and change processes discussed in
question 1 above?... What kinds of conditions enable
people and groups to resist? What circumstances
block the development of consciousness and
empowerment actions?
3. What tactics are used to strengthen the facilitative
factors and to reduce the inhibiting factors?...
Questions related to wellness
We are conceptualizing wellness as an outcome.
What was the ideal outcome of your overall
strategies in terms of power relations?...
What was the expected immediate outcome of your
tactics in terms of power relations?...
What were the obtained or actual outcomes of your
tactics in terms of power relations?...
The death of community psychology (and the development of
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How do you explain the outcomes? How do you
explain potential gaps between actual and ideal or
expected outcomes? What is your theory for
explaining how wellness is or is not achieved at the
various levels of analysis? Is it possible that wellness
is easier to achieve at the lower levels of analysis
than at higher levels? How does power equalization
affect wellness at various levels of analysis?
Focusing systematically on economic, political, physical,
and social forms of both capital and oppression across the different
levels and stages of development leads to different questions than
psychologists are generally equipped to answer. They are
questions that address causes of, and solutions to, systemic and
structural problems in the environment. They help to identify and
develop capacities at multiple levels. They avoid labeling and
blaming victims. In short, they are community psychology
questions, but ones we need to look to other disciplines to help
answer.
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Figure 1: A model of the process whereby psychosocial stress induces psychopathology and some conceptions of how to
counteract this process (from Dohrenwend, 1978).
Community and
Organizational
Political
Development
Action
Situation
In
Environment
Situational Mediators,
Material Supports or Handicaps,
Social Supports or Handicaps, Etc.
Transient
Stress
Reaction
Stressful
Life
Event
Psychological
Characteristics of
Person in Event
General
Education and
Socialization
Psychological
Growth
No Substantial
Permanent
Psychological Change
PsychoPathology
Psychological Mediators,
Aspirations and Values, Coping
Abilities or Disabilities, Etc.
Individual
Skill
Training
Crisis
Intervention
Corrective
Therapies
The death of community psychology (and the development of
community research and action) in the United States
Figure 2 (adapted from Christens & Perkins, in press)
308
309
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