Publisher's Synopsis
Community Psychology is a field with a unique new perspective for understanding the individuals within their environment which includes the larger social systems that affect their lives. Community psychology represents a new way of thinking about people's behavior and well-being in the context of all the community environments and social systems in which they live their lives. The purpose of this book is to develop that way of thinking and to show how the perspective is applicable to a very wide range of contemporary problems. Focus on person-environment fit, while working collaboratively with groups and fostering empowerment, are emphasized. Prevention and early intervention through collaborative research and action are seen as valuable tools for improving people's lives. Community psychology does not focus on "problems" but rather on the strengths and competencies of community members. Community Psychology must go beyond its traditional concerns and its focus on local communities. The idea includes collaborating more with other disciplines, societal institutions, business companies; learning from different cultural values approaches; focusing on macro and micro issues of community analysis and community building; developing its identity as a linking science. This 1st volume of Encyclopaedia of International Community Psychology entitled International Community Psychology: History and Theories draws on a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives and approaches to examine social problems and promote well-being of people in their communities. Some fields that contribute to community psychology include, but are not limited to, sociology, community development, ecology, public health, anthropology, cultural/performance studies, public policy, and social work. The main issue for the social sciences from Community Psychology it is not the relation between the individual and society, but the relation between the individual, community and society. Community Psychology as a linking science, recognizing the diversity of its local or regional agendas, can help in studying and understanding social problems from their subsumed human relational realities. It can contribute also to the knowledge and comprehension of individual subjective and objective situations related to healthy and unhealthy behaviors and mental conditions. This is to say that the concept and reality of community imply not only a mediating role in the exchanges between the individual and society, but that it becomes, in some sense, a third important element in order to explain and understand the status and dynamics of the human condition: relationality, communication, conversation.
