La Muerte de la Psicologia Communitaria en los Estados Unidos:Los Asuntos sobre la Diversidad Teorica, Metodologica, y Practica

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

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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 psycho-social 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 1Historical 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

2 current/ future directions:

1. Disease Technological innovation Bio, redux/ (CP w/in Psych in flux, shrinking)

2. Simplistic reductionism

Interdisciplinarity (to integrate all the above)

Transdisciplinary eco-psycho-political action-research/ Stokols, Maton, Saegert, Watts, Prilleltensky, Speer

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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 afore-mentioned 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 self-identified 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.2 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 political, it is interesting that, despite the late Speaker of the U.S.

2 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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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, 1977), and within community psychology, Julian Rappaport

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(1981), Ken Heller (1989), Cary Cherniss (1991), Chris Keys (Keys & Frank, 1987), Irma Serrano-Garcia (1984), and Marc Zimmerman (Zimmerman & Rappaport, 1988).3 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 important perspectives for this agenda include Pierre Bourdieu (1985), Bent Flyvbjerg (1998), and Paolo Freire (1970). (The 3 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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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 non-Western 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?

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

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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 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,

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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 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

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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 long-standing 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).

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

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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), Rod Watts (Watts, Williams & Jagers, 2003), Isaac Prilleltensky (2001), and Paul Speer (et al., 2003).

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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.

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

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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 sub-disciplines 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 psycho-behavioral and micro-system, the group/organizational and meso-system, and the community/societal or exo- and macro-system levels (Bronfenbrenner, 1979).

The third dimension encompasses four environmental or substantive domains that are all essential for understanding the

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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 at the various levels of analysis?...

Questions related to liberation/empowerment:

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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?...

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

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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).

Psycho-Pathology

PoliticalAction

Community and Organizational Development

General Education and Socialization

IndividualSkill

Training

CrisisIntervention

CorrectiveTherapies

PsychologicalGrowth

No SubstantialPermanent

Psychological Change

TransientStress

Reaction

StressfulLife

Event

SituationIn

Environment

Psychological Characteristics of Person in Event

Situational Mediators,Material Supports or Handicaps,

Social Supports or Handicaps, Etc.

Psychological Mediators,Aspirations and Values, Coping

Abilities or Disabilities, Etc.

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Figure 2 (adapted from Christens & Perkins, in press)

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