A Guide to Conducting Prevention Research in the Community

First Steps

James G Kelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317736219
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This provocative and useful volume is a step-by-step guide to assist professionals in implementing valid and useful community research and creating preventive interventions that have positive and lasting effects on the development of the community. The authors--including James G. Kelly, one of the fathers of prevention--offer valuable suggestions for developing community processes to assist the prevention researcher and the community in designing research that is embedded in the community. Experts focus on the topics that can help establish and sustain effective long-term working relationships with community members. Numerous examples illustrate how the collaborative working relationship can create the variety of resources that are needed to eventually implement policy changes stimulated by the research and help to sustain the impact of the research findings after the research has been completed.This exciting book illustrates how community research related to the prevention of mental illness and the promotion of mental health can be scientific and objective, as well as a positive collaboration between the research staff and community members.

• Focus upon community needs
• Emphasize educational activities to support the prevention research
• Identify points of policy impact before the research begins
• Enhance the development of social networks and social support systems for the development of competencies
• Provide criteria for the selection of systemic variables for the research
• Include reference to the multiple levels of a community which may affect the research topic
• Specify ways in which participants can identify and own the research topic
• Outline criteria for assessing the side effects of the prevention research In order to better understand the needs, values, commitments, and resources of the community in which he or she is working, the researcher is encouraged to select research topics derived from underlying community needs, educated the public about prevention, identify points of policy impact, and determine the informal social networks that enhance the development of social competencies in the community. The benefits of the collaborative relationship between prevention researchers and the community are strongly emphasized. A Guide to Conducting Prevention Research in the Community aims to guide citizens and professionals in implementing valid and useful community research and create preventive interventions that have positive and lasting effects on the development of the community.

Part I:
The Reconnaissance Task

At the heart of this approach to prevention is the commitment by the research staff to invest in a variety of activities through which they become acquainted with the social context of their research. To develop opportunities to increase the benefits of the prevention research, it is necessary for the research staff to be educated about the community, its needs, its values, its commitments and its resources. Each of the following four chapters focuses on ways in which research can be accommodated to the community, and alerts the research staff to actions they can take to help the research enterprise contribute to the development of the community’s resources.

Chapter 1
Selecting a Topic That Derives from Underlying Community Needs

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
And I don’t know the kind of person you are
A pattern others made may prevail in the world
And following the wrong god home we may miss our star. (William Stafford from “A Ritual to Read to Each Other, in Stories That Could Be True: Harper & Row, 1977.)

Often when a mental health professional identifies a presenting problem it has already reached a stage where the community perception is that the problem is beyond prevention. Concerns often expressed in communities, such as teenage suicide, latchkey children, juvenile delinquency, spouse abuse, middle-aged depression, alcoholism, and work absenteeism, are all examples of topics that stimulate much legitimate community concern and anxiety. Characteristic prevention solutions are hotline programs or self-help or social support groups that can provide temporary help. Yet, each of these common sense solutions often lacks an appreciation of the multifaceted aspects of the factors that are affecting the condition.

The first chapter emphasizes reconnaissance and analysis of the basic structural qualities of the community that may affect a specific problem. For example, to the extent that a community is influenced by economic depression or lacks identifiable social structures to promote economic development, prevention programs can be directed to develop such social structures—a church, a business organization, a citizens planning council, and so forth—that can focus directly on the economic issues within the community. The approach outlined in this volume assumes that developing a momentum for community and economic development will have a positive impact upon the sources of stress within the community. For those communities which ostensibly have economic self-sufficiency, reconnaissance may instead probe such topics as issues of sex-role clarification and parent-child communication.

Particularly salient in contemporary American culture are undeveloped opportunities to observe and integrate the effects of the social environment upon the lifestyle of the family. For example, men are now expected to be both egalitarian and providers. Women are challenged to be independent, yet are still expected to be the source of family values. Those spouses likely to accommodate to changing conditions are often without social support and social structures that will assist in coping with life’s transitional stages, that is, relatives, neighbors, and churches available as sanctions in the 1950s are often less available today. Similarly, parents with “traditional” family values may encounter considerable stress in acknowledging and dealing with their children’s search for independence, particularly if that independence questions or does not meet the expectations of “traditional” values. The challenge of being a parent requires at least clear values, flexibility, and understanding coupled with firmness. Achieving this balance is often difficult to realize, particularly when social structures that serve as resources for generating, maintaining and expanding parents’ capacity to achieve such a balance are insufficient or nonexistent.

The challenge in defining prevention research is to move beyond an individual interpretation of phenomena to a broader understanding which includes the effects of community and social structures on individual concerns. This requires delving into the culture so that the unique qualities of the community are noted and blended into the design of the preventive intervention. For many persons in many communities, the preventive solution for a problem will depend upon generating social settings to support the learning and preservation of individuals’ competencies.

The following guidelines focus upon specific strategies to assist the research staff in their appraisal of the community. The future task for a science of prevention is to collect systematic empirical data for the development of these guidelines. Until then, the following seven informal “rules of thumb” are offered to help understand community social contexts. The community context is important because, without knowledge of community resources, ways to improve health will be reduced.

A. Examine Community Core Values

This topic refers to creating a portrait of the basic social norms which guide social transactions in the community. While this is a complex and potentially limitless undertaking, the spirit of this guideline is to suggest that those working in prevention need to gain an understanding of the social norms directing and regulating behavior. How can this be done?

One method focuses upon media-related activities such as reading community newspapers, noting billboards, and listening to local radio and TV stations to assess the issues that have either congealed or fragmented the particular geographical area. Another method is to interview a sample of community residents from different social strata such as formal community leaders (mayor, city manager, board of chamber of commerce, etc.), key informal leaders (school teachers, clergy, heads of neighborhood organizations), “dissidents” working for improved options and opportunities, long-term residents and newcomers, including both advantaged and disadvantaged persons.

Why these particular residents? Informal conversations and interviews with these persons can provide a fuller, more coherent picture of the social norms of the community as a whole which can then illuminate the possible options for integrating new people, new ideas, and any potential changes into the existing community.

For example, in Topeka, Kansas, in response to concern about large gatherings of youths in the evenings which were generally perceived to be related to incidents of vandalism, dangerous driving, drug abuse, and other crimes, a mobile counseling center was set up in a shopping mall parking lot. The center’s objective was contacting youths and introducing them to positive alternative uses of leisure time. Utilizing an ecological-systems approach, the evaluation team included interviews with juveniles, police, counselors, merchants, and mall patrons, in addition to observation of parking lot activities, in their evaluation of the project’s impact on the community (Campbell, Steenbarger, Smith, & Stucky, 1982). They reported that norms of appropriate behavior appeared to be operating that governed the expectations and activities of the different groups. Whereas the juveniles used the parking lot as a meeting place for normal adolescent social activity, the merchants and patrons used the lot as a business facility and expressed concern about variables that could influence net profits and traffic problems. Police were concerned with law violations while counselors saw the situation as an opportunity to provide counseling services. By including data from all involved groups, these different perspectives could be integrated into a complete picture.

A second example of creating a more complete picture is the way in which Kanter (1983) analyzed how companies handle changes. The data sources Kanter utilized in her analysis of how General Motors (GM) responded to change consisted of meetings with high level corporate and United Auto Worker informants, including past and present officers; interviews at eight facilities with union leaders, personnel staff, and first-, second-, and third-line supervisors; casual conversations with other GM employees and officers and with students who had worked at GM; presentations made by GM officers and staff; and information derived from books, articles, personnel manuals, policy statements, and other documents.

If possible, it is important to obtain information from two additional types of persons: (1) the opinion makers, those persons whose views shape, often behind the scenes, the events and issues that affect the way things get done in the community, and (2) the power makers, those who are alleged to control resources. In writing about politics and power in Dallas, Texas, for example, Achor (1978) points out that Dallas politics often demonstrate the dominant authority of the informal, less visible power structure composed of a select group of business elite rather than the formal structure of elected city officials.

In a study of the identification of community leaders (Preston, 1969), three major methodological approaches were utilized: the reputational, in which those with a general reputation for leadership and those with leadership in specific interest areas are named by a group of informants who are presumed to be knowledgeable about the community’s affairs; the action approach, in which leaders in major community action programs are identified by reviewing newspaper coverage of the programs and by interviewing participants in the programs; and the positional approach, in which those holding offices in more or less community-relevant organizations are identified. Preston advocates the combined use of the three approaches, considering inclusion of the reputational approach important because it is useful in identifying the “behind-the-scenes” leaders (Preston, 1969, p. 213).

The analysis from such inquiries will help to determine how community core values will be affected by a prevention research program and how the community as a whole will support particular forms or styles of preventive intervention. One hallmark for generating long-term response to a prevention program is the extent to which the proposed “novel” activity is congruent with the way things are already done in the community. Failure to take community social norms into account is likely to reduce the effectiveness of the prevention program, as illustrated by the following example.

A six-month educational program carried out in a Canadian community was designed to convey current psychiatric information about mental health and illness. Although the program was well funded and carefully designed to fit with community facilities, there was no significant change in attitudes toward the mentally ill. Upon evaluating this failure, the researchers discovered that the community’s:

ideas about mental illness and the mentally ill appeared inconsistent and often illogical when judged in terms of professional ideas. Looked at in their own terms, however, they were consistent and even reasonable and necessary. The whole set of ideas, beliefs, and attitudes about mental illness held by the people of Prairie Town Canada was a response not to considerations of empirical truth, but rather to the needs of the community. (Cumming & Cumming, 1955; cited by Rubinstein, Kelly, & Maines, 1985, p. 11)

Key themes to be explored in interviews to ascertain community values include: attitudes to outsiders, criteria of deviant behavior, the role of public and private funds in the support of health and welfare, evidence of community members successfully promoting novel programs, and the ways in which citizens perceive the causes of difficulties and successes of community projects. Each of these themes focuses on a different facet of community values and suggests various ways in which the community can be looked to as a reservoir for a variety of resources.

B. Analyze Community Traditions for Responding to Community Problems

Here the focus is on determining the existing strategies and styles of the community in responding to problems. To what extent to do community leaders, formal and informal, work together to generate solutions, either overtly or behind the scenes? What is the influence of the press in helping frame or diagnose the issues? Is community attention focused on scapegoating particular individuals or groups of individuals? What legal sanctions and policies have been developed to support proposed solutions? How have business interests responded? What success has there been in implementing solutions? Are there social structures or social settings for pulling together opinions of problems and are there specific processes for generating, examining and clarifying new solutions from a variety of resources and community groups?

An example of the importance of such social structures comes from data from a survey of citizen participation in community crime prevention in three urban areas (Dubow & Podolefsky, 1982). The data indicated that such participation stems not so much from citizens’ special views or fears about crime, but rather primarily from involvement in a community group that provides a structure for participation, usually a multi-issue group in which crime is only one concern.

The emphasis in the above inquiries is on identifying just how the community has probed and resolved issues that affect public health, education, economic deprivation, public ordinances, and other social issues. What is important in the research process is that the research staff understand characteristic community responses to problems and identify to what extent these responses are compatible with the continued development of personal competencies and adaptations of community members.

Ways in which community residents have responded to problems are illustrated by the two following examples. The Love Canal Homeowner’s Association was formed by citizens battling against hazardous waste dumps in Niagara Falls, New York. The association (described in more detail in Chapter 3, Section B) not only served as a structure enabling residents to gain some power but also as a source of information, support and cohesion for the residents (Gibbs, 1982a, 1982b).

In her book about a Mexican-American barrio in West Dallas, Texas, which she calls “La Bajura,” Achor (1978) describes the activities of a neighborhood political organization, La Junta de los Barrios. This organization has chosen to focus on local community concerns and has become increasingly adept at utilizing the resources not only of the barrio but also of the larger urban society. Achor says of the organization:

Within their own neighborhood they hold frequent meetings to emphasize the urgency of local problems, to propose plans of action, and to marshal community support. Their extensive knowledge of the barrio’s social organization permits them to disseminate information rapidly about current or impending matters, by contacting key individuals within kinship groups or family alliances, (pp. 127, 128)

The members of La Junta visit City Hall, circulate petitions, and actively seek newspaper and TV publicity for their organization and for the barrio’s problems, in addition to holding community meetings. They have developed the special skills necessary to successfully cultivate ties outside the barrio and seek cooperation from local Anglos, yet they maintain primary allegiance to and credibility with the barrio community. Their adaptive strategy has effected not only some sociopolitical and economic gains but also an increased sense of self-esteem and ethnic pride.

To the extent that community standards blame, simplify or isolate problems of one particular social grouping, the prospect of getting at root causes will be reduced. To the extent that the community style of decision making is hierarchical, then access to top officials is essential in clarifying these issues. The more top-down the decision-making structure is, the more the need for the research staff to communicate with top officials and persuade them to support specific research activities. Unless the prevention program is designed and carried out such that it blends with community traditions, the life span of the intervention can be expected to be reduced.

C. Processes and Traditions for Communication Between Diverse Community Groups

The concept of diversity refers to political beliefs, ethnic qualities, social class, gender, age, and lifestyle differences as well as length of residence, occupational roles, and religious preferences. From the point of view of prevention research, the assumption is that diversity of resources can create more avenues for identifying, managing and resolving major differences which, in turn, create more opportunities for the community to generate resources or utilize existing resources to develop and enhance prevention programs.

As social structures erode and living patterns become more fragmented, and where there is less sense of how people are integrated within their community, there is less sense of how to get a particular problem solved and of how to succeed in generating and preserving resources. A predictive sign of a community’s responsiveness to absorbing prevention programs is its capacity to generate both traditions of community solidarity and social norms for encouraging social ties between persons of diverse groups. The task is to assess how such communication takes place, the settings whe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• Preface
• PART I: THE RECONNAISSANCE TASK
• PART II: THE RESEARCH TASK
• Conclusion
• References