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Zusammenfassung MM6 - Community Psychology

Community-psychologische Prävention und die Förderung sozialer Veränderung

What is Community Psychology?

• There is a focus on the social context of behavior
• Theories and interventions consider the interaction of different factors on several levels (micro-, meso- and macro-level)
• Distribution of power, empowerment and disempowerment are relevant concepts of community psychology
• The focus is often on effective prevention rather than on the retrospective treatment of problems
• Participatory research approaches and a pluralism of methods are implemented

Values in Community Psychology

• The community psychologist formulates her values explicitly and discusses them
• Values guide the actions and research within community psychology
• It may happen that generally accepted values, which may serve to maintain a status quo, are questioned and the perspective of a minority is brought into focus
• Values should be as complementary as possible, but can also conflict
• Social Justice: Fair distribution of resources, opportunities, obligations and power for members of communities within a society
  • Processes should be determined with the participation of all members of a society
• Respect for Diversity: Different social identities based on gender, ethnic and national affiliation, sexual orientation, disability, socioeconomic status, age, religious affiliation should be recognized and respected
• Sense of Community: Feeling of belonging and interdependence that connects individuals as a community.
  • Is a resource for social support
• Collective Well-Being: Within a community, the objective and subjective needs of all individuals and groups are to be brought into a state of equilibrium.
• Empowerment and Participation: Ensure that members of the community are involved in decision-making at all system levels.
• Collaboration on equal terms: The community psychologists bring their professional expertise and at the same time enable the participating citizens to contribute their own knowledge, resources and strengths.
• Evidence-based: Community psychological measures refer to empirical findings. In doing so, it is also critically reflected which values underlie the respective research.
• Multilevel perspective: Individuals are considered in the context of socio-ecological system levels and a focus is placed on strengths and resources of communities at different levels.

Beyond prejudice: Are negative evaluations the problem and is getting us to like one another more the solution?

Describe the two paths to social change in societies characterized by inequality. Compare the two models to each other using Dixon et al.'s (2012) taxonomy.

• Prejudice Reduction Model

  • If negative evaluation of the disadvantaged is defined as the problem, then the emotional and cognitive rehabilitation of the advantaged becomes the solution.
  • We need to get such people to like others more and to abandon their negative stereotypes
  • Incidences of discrimination will decline, creating a more equitable society in which the potential for intergroup conflict wanes.

• Collective Action Model

  • Dominant group members rarely (if ever) give away their power and privileges.
  • These must be wrested from them by members of subordinate groups
  • The analytic focus lies more on the resistance of subordinates
  • Social change is predicated upon mass mobilization, a process that typically brings representatives of historically disadvantaged groups into conflict with representatives of historically advantaged groups

Where do the differences lie in terms of the main actors?

• Prejudice Reduction Model

  • The person whose negative feelings and thoughts need to be changed

• Collective Action Model

  • Members of the subordinated

What are the consequences for interventions?

• Prejudice Reduction Model

  • If change remained hidden in the recess of the individual mind, then prejudice reduction interventions would have limited utility

• Collective Action Model

  • An "us" versus "them" mentality is generally construed as functional and strategic: It encourages members of disadvantaged groups to display in-group loyalty and commitment to the cause of changing society, to form coalitions with similar groups, and to act togehter in their common interest

What are the consequences on the behavioral level?

• Prejudice Reduction Model

  • Induced effect on relations is belived to ripple outwards to shape wider patterns of intergroup conflict and discrimination
  • Deminishes our tendency to view the world in "us" versus "them" terms, encouraging us to view others either as individuals, as part of a common in-group, or at least as people who share "crossed" category memberships
  • They foster positive emotional responses towards others (empathy and trust), whilst decreasing negative responses (anxiety and anger)
    • Contact decreases prejudice in 94 % of 515 studies reviewed. This effect was largely explained by reductions in intergroup anxiety and increases in intergroup empathy, as well as by improvements in participants' knowledge about members of other groups.
  • Engourage participants to view one another as equal in status and sometimes involve active attempts to establish such equality, at least within the immediate context of intervention
  • Reduce intergroup conflict in historically divided societies, producing more stable and peaceful societies.

• Collective Action Model

  • Instigate intergroup conflict in order to challange institutional inequality

What is meant by paradoxical effects of intergroup contact?

• Dixon et al. (2007; 2010)

  • Exploration of the relationship between interracial contact and South Africans' support for race-targeted policies being implemented by the ANC government to redress the legacy of apartheid
    • For whites, positive contact with blacks was positively correlated with support for government policies of redress; for blacks, positive contact with whites was negatively correlated with support for such policies
    • Contact was associated with increases in whites' and decreases in blacks' support for social change
  • Exploration of the relationship between interracial contact and black South Africans' perceptions of racial discrimination in the post-apartheid era.
    • Respondents who reported having favourable contact experiences with whites also perceived the racial discrimination faced by their group to be less severe
    • This effect was mediated both by pereived personal discrimination and by blacks' racial attitudes
    • The inverse relationship between contact and judgments of collective discrimination was partly explained by reductions in respondents' sense of being personally targeted for racial discrimination, as well as increases in their positive emotions towards whites

• Cakal et al. (2011)

  • Contact hat a "sedative effective" on black South Africans' readiness to engage in collective action benefitting their in-group, which operated both directly and indirectly
    • Positive contact with whites was associated directly with a reduced inclination to participate in collective action
    • Such contact exercised an indirect effect on collective action by moderating participants' sense of relative deprivation
    • For participants who had comparatively little contact with whites, a sense of relative deprivation was positively associated with collective action tendencies. This relationship did not emerge for participants who had comparatively higher levels of contact with whites.

• Wright and Lubensky (2006)

  • Contact with white Americans reduced Africans' and Latin Americans' willingness to endorse group efforts to accomplish racial equality.
  • This effect was mediated by shifts in their sense of identification with their respective ethnic groups

• Troop et al. (2012)

  • Making white friends tended to lower perception of racial discrimination and decrease support for ethnic activism amongst members of three minority groups
  • The effects were strongest for African Americans, the group that otherwise reported the highest levels of experienced discrimination and the greatest willingness to challange such discrimination

• Saguy et al. (2009, Study 2) and Tausch et al. (2009)

  • Positive contact was associated with reduced perceptions of social injustice and lowered support for social change amongst members of disadvantaged groups
  • Such effects were indirect, being mediated by respondents' attitudes towards the out-group in question

• Saguy et al. (2009, Study 1)

  • Experimental study
  • Higher and lower power groups interacted under conditions that emphasized either their differences (less positive contact) or their commonality (more positive contact). Higher-power groups members were asked to distribute rewards across the two groups whilst lower-power group members estimated the nature of the resulting distribution
  • Participants in the low-power/common-identity/positve-contact cell consistently overestimated the extent to which higher-power participants would distribute rewards equitably. In reality, the powerful group displayed a predictable pattern of in-group favouritism.

• Glasford and Calcagno (2012)

  • Cueing a sense of common identity amongst members of black and Latin American communities in the United States increased their political solidarity, their readiness to work together to improve the status ob both groups.
  • This effect as moderated by contact with members of the historically advantaged white community: The more intergroup contact Latin Americans had with whites, the less effective the commonality intervention was fostering their sense of political solidarity with blacks.

• Contact exercised a potentially conterproductive impact on the political consciousness of the disadvantaged.

• The conflict of harmonious intergroup contact may lie in the fact that despite harmony leading to increased positive attitudes, it also has the potential to decrease a variety of social-change oriented responses among minority group members.

• In so far as prejudice reduction undermines the already tenuous possibility that subordinate group members will develop the kind of insurgent consciousness that fuels resistance to inequality, it may ultimately reproduce rather than disrupt the status quo.

Which conclusions where made regarding the compatibility of both models?

• One pole of the argument might assert that the two forms of social change are fundamentally complementary - that is, that getting people to like one another more will ultimately lead to social justice in a deeper sense.
• The other pole might assert that the two forms of social cange are fundamentally incommensurable and that the drive for prejudice reduction has for too long marginalized, if not obstructed, more pressing concerns about core distributive justice.
• We sympathize with the latter position, particularly when applied to the problem of improving intergroup relations in societies characterized by long-standing, systematic discrimination.
• Prejudice reduction can serve as a psychological mechanism through which members of priviledged groups become enlisted within oppositional struggles to improve the situation of the disadvantaged.
• It is important to examine the processes that lead some dominant group members to oppose the in-group's repression of others, to pave the way for subordinate group resistance, or even to agitate for an end to dominance themselves. Contact and similar interventions may play a role in these processes.
• We cannot simply tack together a prejudice reduction with a collective action perspective whilst ignoring their incommensurable assumptions about the mechanisms through which change occurs.
• When power relations are bound up with paternalistic ideologies and associated institutional structures, then the promotion of positive evaluations of others is by no means antithetical with conservative political orientations.
• Reducing prejudice may not result in transformation at an institutional level.
• Historical evidence suggests that social inequality is eradicated more through the collective will of the disadvantaged than through well-intentioned reforms of the advantaged.
• The prejudice reduction and collective action involve opposing psychological processes. That is, prejudice reduction decreases the likelihood of collective action precisely because it reduces subordinate group members' sense of collective identity and sense of being targeted for discrimination, whilst increasing their positive evaluation of the dominant group.

The Scientific Foundation of Prevention - The Status quo and Future Challenges for Developmental Crime Prevention

What is meant by Developmental Crime Prevention (DCP)?

Developmental crime prevention (DCP): Preventive measures or programs designed to prevent antisocial careers by reducing risk factors of crime and/or promoting positive development based on empirical knowledge about normal and deviant social development from birth to adulthood.

What are the basic principles that should be considered when developing a prevention program?

Five interrelated steps must be taken into account in order to place prevention programs on a comprehensive sicentific foundation:

• General legitimation of a program's preventiv and normative credentials
• General developmental foundation
• Program theory underlying its content
• Intervention theory underlying its conduct and adminstration
• Systematic validation by proving its efficacy, effectiveness, and successful dssemination

When is a measure considered evidence-based?

• Evidence-based: The prevention program has proved to be efficacious with randomized experiments.
• Empirically validated treatments: When a specific treatment approach complies with certain minimal demands such as a certain number of independent experiments with between-group designs delivering positive results.
• Blueprint series (Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence):
  • The state of empirical evaluation research has to be assessed systematically
  • Both the methodological strengths and weaknesses of the studies have to be analyzed in detail
  • Further criteria have to be considered by the program comission
• Sherman Report (Campbell Collaboration)
  • Base their statements on evidence on systematic reserch reviews on different types of interventions.
  • A prevention approach can only be evidence-based when enough studies report positive findings, methodological influences on the effect have been controlled sufficiently, and the heterogeneity of the findings does not exceed a set limit.
  • They can identify moderators and mediators of outcomes that deliver information about the conditions under which the effects can be expected to be optimal

Describe Beelmann's model for the development of scientifically based prevention measures.

General legitimation of a program's preventive and normative credentials

Crime and antisocial problems within our society

• Prevalance rates of 5 to 15 % depending on the severity of the problems
• International crime statistics have confirmed repeatedly that criminal behavior is one of the most pressing problems under youth
• There are no exact thresholds for prevalance rates of problems before they should be addressed by preventive measures
  • Boys are far more involved in violent crimes than girls, prevalence rates for serious violent crimes among girls are relatively low
  • Nevertheless, one could argue for specific prevention programs for girls because reasearch confirms girl-specific developmenal trajectories that seem to be different from those for boys
  • Are antisocial problems in girls pressing enough to justify a new and special prevention program (finance, fund)
• Researchers and program developers must clearly found each new program on the seriousness of a problem wihle giving sound scientifically based reasons.

Developmental prognosis and stability of antisocial behavior

• Preventive action relates to events to be avoided in the future and is naturally initiated at a stage in which no problem is present.
• It is necessary to justify theoretically why an early prevention should lower the probability of a negative event in the future
• This implies the need of reports about the problems stability and successive exacerbation over the course of development
• Youth crime has developmental precursores, and the stability of early antisocial behavior leading to crime is relatively high (especially heterotypic continuity)
• Models assuming various types and developmental trajectories toward persistent crime provide even stronger indications of the need for early DCP
• But: There are hight numbers of "false positives"

Approach to prevention

• Individual models of DCP (psychsocial and edcucational)
• Nonpsychological or noneducational alternatives: Legal, sociopolitical, or even medical measures
• A good scientific foundation must make it clear why psychosocial processes address precisely those factors that will impede an antisocial career
  • What kind of processes are involved in a given problem and which variables should be influenced
  • We have to explain a priori why the intended target variables should influence antisocial and criminal development
• Only systematic empirical research will be able to tell us which prevention approach is the most effective one.

Specific form of preventive strategy

• Universal or targeted strategy (see below)
• Should be determined a priori and decided on the basis of systematic scientific knowledge
• This decision depends on results of comparative evaluations and a complete series of more fundamental consideration
• All meta-analyses in the field agree on the finding that targeted prevention is generally more effective than universal preventive programs
• Effect sizes from meta-analyses inform us only about the existing research which may well be limited when we want to know about, for example, the societal effects of preventive programs

Normative credentials of prevention

• Norms and values cannot be derived from scientific theories or empirical results, but have to come from normative models of the optimal shaping of human developments and from normative models in general.
• The normative basis of prevention goals has to be specified for ethical reasons and form a pragmatic standpoint of outcomes.
• Expose any existing normative differences in the prevention goals to minimize these through discussion.
• Nobody within our society will probably object to the prevention of crime and antisocial behavior from a normative standpoint. However, normative discrepancies or conflicts between persons or groups involved in the prevention program mostly become relevant in situations in which we have to decied between prevention alternatives.
• Efficacious prevention needs to have at least a basic agreement between all involved parties concerned on the normative premises underlying the programs and measures and the basic signifcance of the targeted problems.
• Make norms and values transparent and seek agreement among all those involved before starting any new prevention initiative.

General developmental foundation

• Theories on human development deliver a fundamental understanding of the principles by which developments (or intraindividual changes) occur.
• They describe and explain exactly those processes that interventions should or want to initiate
• Transactional model: Describes development as the outcome of continuous feedback processes between the biological constiution (genotype), individual behavior (phenotype), and the social environment (environtype) with the latter being conceived as a conglomerate of micro-, meso-, and macrosystems.
  • Example: Major changes occur through the systematic increase in self-directed development regulation over the course of development. As children grow older, environmental influences fluctuate increasingly due to the broadening of the social system in which a child interacts. This is accompanied by a decline in the fundamental importance of familial socialization system.
  • The transition to a new ecosystem is conceived not only as an outcome of developmental processes but also as a starting point for new developments.
  • DCP: Significance of stronger self-regulation processes or use of ecological transitions as phases of heightened responsiveness or higher sensitivity to external stimuli.
• Most early educational intervention programs refer to ecological models of development that integrate various agents and address different systems
• Other prevention measures (child skills training) still scarcely take these ecological principles into account.
• DCP programs often lack clear connections or even any hints as to how they relate to macrocontext of development.
• Developmental deliberations reveal little about the concrete content of a prevention measure, but more about broad conceptional orientations.
• Any developmentally well-founded program should be organized according to these principles or, in other words, it should at least not contradict the principles of human development.

A program theory underlying ist content

Theoretical assumptions on the emergence and maintenance of antisocial behavior

• Derive the content of a program from both theory and empirical research
• Explanation of undesirable outcomes that should be prevented (i.e., etiological models) and the possibilities for prevention that results from these assumptions
• Findings from developmental psychopathology on the onset and manifestation of an antisocial career are of decisive importance.
• Effects or risk and protective factors, the course of developmental trajectories, etiological theories

Empirically confirmed risk factors

• Aggressive youth lack important competencies in social information processing
  • Child skill trainings focousing on these aspects
• Coercive interactions between parents and childern are one of the most important risk factors for the development of antisocial behavior in boys
  • Parenting training programs
• Risk factors inform program developers about important skills and deficits that are involved in the development of antisocial behavior and correspendingly need to be either encouraged or reduced.
• Problems with deriving interventions from risk and protecitve factors: Interventions should not address developmental risk and protective factors per se, but only those that are amenable to change and operating dynamically at a given timepoint for prevention.
• Risk factors are relative, their effects may depend on the developmental context.
  • Culture- and context-specific effects between parental discipline and antisocial behavior problems
    • Mild corporal punishment (e.g., a slap on the backside) seemd to lead to lower behavior problems in Black families, whereas such measures where accompanied by increasing problem rates in White families
• Differential prevention conctepts within parent trainings programs

Empirically confirmed protective factors

• They contribute to reducing the risk for deviance under stress
• They are able to exert a positive influence on negative processes that would otherwise lead to a higher risk status
• The derivative function of risk and protective factors has general limitations, for instance, due to their relative role according to age-related effects within normal and psychopathological development.
• Developmental path models, broader etiological theories with a small to medium scope represent important sources of information for deriving program content

Developmental path models

• Identify specific subgroups and provide information not only on which deficits or competencies need to be reduced or encouraged but also on whether a certain form of prvention measure is more appropriate for a certain group
• Moffit (1993): Destinction between adolescent-limited and life-course-persistent types
• Frick & Viding (2009): Two subtypes of eraly severe patterns of antisocial behavior (e.g., whether or not callous and unemotional tratis are involved) that each display differences in risk factors, causal processes, and patterns of deviation from normal development.
  • The content of early interventions must be tailored to fit these subtypes, although they probably both display the same antisocial behavior on a phenomenological level.

Specific developmental and etiological (causal) models

• Inform program developers not only about risk and possibly protective factors but also about specific aspects of emergence and maintainance of behavior problems and the patterns of developmental processes
• Social information processing theory
  • Informs us about relevant competencies within this domain as well as about different stages of processing and their relationships
  • It is shortsighted to work on the planning phase of social information processing alone (althogh this is a well-konwn risk factor) while ignoring the preceding stages when constructing a prevention program, because deficits in social perception and social attribution will negatively influence the planning of social behavior.
• The broader the theory the less directly one can deduce concrete program content
• We need broad band theories as well as research on single risk and protective factors in order to gather as much theoretical and empirical information as possible about the scope and aims of DCP programs
• Cumulative model of chain reactions (Lösel & Bender, 2005)
  • At least stable forms of antisocial behavior development can be predicted by a series of causal processes over the course of development that become more dynamic with age
  • They permit an identification of single risk factors and clearly disclose different manifestations of deviance.
  • They classify relevant developmental processes along the age axis and can be used to obtain indications on the onset x content interaction of prevention measures

Sound conception of prevention administration and conduct

Intensity and the program structure

• Different models ranging from one-event or one-shot interventions across short-term interventions up to measures that accompany developmental periods or last several years
• Intermittent concepts (programs with booster sessions)
• Programs can vary in terms of total amout of time as well as in the number, duration, and frequency of sessions
• This variation should correspond to the aims of the prevention, the capacities of the target group, considerations on implementation, and available resources
• We have still no clear indication which intensity a program should have
  • Meta-analyses have reveald positive relations between the intensity of a measure and its efficacy (Gansle, 2005), negative relations (Beelmann, 2008), and even no relations at all (Wilson & Lipsey, 2007)
  • More intensive programs are basically necessary and would potentially lead to better outcomes, but the length of such programs leads to greater difficulties with sinking participant motivation
• In an evaluation of parent training programs, the most intensive concepts had the lowest effects partly due to high dopout rates (Beelmann, 2008)

Didactic and methodological design

• Type of administration (open or structured; frontal or interactive or self-directed; group or individual)
• Structuring according to different phases (warm-up phase, booster exercises)
• Sequence of intervention units (successive or modular)
• Selection of educational and psychological methods (information transfer, role play exercise, games, group discussions, problem-solving practice, in-vivo training)
• Type and role of the program administrator
  • The invervention developer has to decide who is going to administer his or her program (only written materials, conducted by specialists, teachers, parents, etc.)
  • Wich professional role should the person administering the program take (e.g., passive or active)
  • Specify the training and the abilities the administrator has to have
• Select and develop the necessary materials to conduct the program in an optimal way

Necessary starting condition to motivate the target group

• Target groups have to have a basic motivation and willingness to change before they will participate in any kind of intervention measure.
• Build up arrangements to establish entry preconditions and increase the willingness to participate
• Prochaska and DiClemente
  • Stage model ranging from motivation to change up to internalizing of new behavior
  • Intervention planning has to be tailored to fit these different stages of change by applying different methods for individuals at different stages of change.
• On necessary step in the program planning seems to be to proactively consider which preconditions are present and to construct program administration in line with these preconditions

Framing conditions of prevention

• Prevention measures are conducted within defined settings under planned conditions
• Specify the conditions for a successful implementation of the program and the instituational contexts.
• This is significant for the delivery of prevention programs within our social welfare system and should already be taken into account when developing the program

Empirical and practical validation

Efficacy, effectiveness, and dissemination

• A final and cricial requirement for scientifically based interventions is a systematic validation through evaluation research
• One evaluation study conducted by the program developer is generally no longer sufficient confirmation of the effect of a program.
• Several independent and qualitatively sound studies in different settings with a broad range of outcome measures are demanded.
• Comparisions between outcomes of demonstration projects and of routine practice have revealed significant differences. Such, the empirical and pracitcal validation involves more than evaluation within randomized controlled trials.
• Flay et al. (2005)
  • Efficacy in methodologically rigorous studies unter optimal conditions
  • Effectiveness in representative practical settings
• Sound ideas and practical measures for disseminating the program in social welfare systems

Outcomes of prevention measures

• The majority of reviews revealed significant though small to moderate effect sizes indicating that DCP have at least some potential for preventing antisocial behavior and crime among children and adelexcents
• Only a few approaches such as chid skill training, parent training, and school-based-programs have been evaluated extensively
• Heterogeneity of research results clearly indicates the impact of several effect size moderators
  • Outcomes depend largely on the choice of effect criteria and assessment strategies
  • Proximal outcomes (social skills, social-cognitive measures) within studies on child skill training or parenting measures in studies on parenting training programs revealed higher effect sizes than more distal, though important outcomes such as antisocial behavior problems or even crime.
• Most programs within DCP still have to prove that they have long-lasting effects on juvenile and adult delinquency and crime.
  • Outstanding exceptions are early intervention programs: Follow-up assessments until adulthood showed that these programs have a small (but significant) impact on crime (but: only nine studies).

Quality of implementation

• Implementation: Transfer of a program concept (its content and administration) into practice.
• Central issue for the dissemination of programs into the social welfare system.
• Research has not been able to tell us in detail which of the aspects for a sound implementation are most important, or how they interrelate.

Targeted or universal prevention

• Targeted prevention with at-risk groups is more effective than universal forms of prevention
• A basic finding in intervention research is that higher risk leads to stronger effects and it can also be found in the field of offender rehabilitation
• Low-risk groups will show no or only hardly any improvement on most criterion measures
• The sometimes very low effect sizes within universal prevention cast doubt on the general legitimation of such strategies, although there are also other arguments that support them

Involvement of the program developer

• Involvement of the program developer in the outcome study is accompanied by higher program effectiveness
• Ongoing debate about whether this is due to the presence of the program developer guaranteeing a good implementation or is simply a manifestation of conflict of interest.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of universal and targeted prevention strategies?

Universal prevention

• Advantages:

  • All risk cases can be addressed.
  • Low intensity of intervention usually required
  • Low stigma for high-risk cases.
  • Early approach to problems
  • Broad publicity for prevention

• Disadvantages:

  • High costs (due to high number of cases)
  • High number of cases without problems (poor motivation)
  • Possible stigmatization for low-risk cases
  • Difficulty in detecting effects (due to high number of low-risk cases).

Targeted prevention

• Advantages:

  • Better adaptation to the target group
  • More specific help possible
  • Relatively low cost (low caseload)
  • Potentially more effective than universal strategies.

• Disadvantages:

  • Difficulties in screening and selecting target population (lower reliability, high cost, low predictive power)
  • Potential stigmatization of the target group
  • Usually high intensity of intervention required.
  • Implementation problems with at-risk groups (selective use, high number of dropouts)

What are the limitations of individual prevention strategies?

• Major sociological theories on crime have already identified the societal factors that also contribute to crime and other developmental, social, and mental health problems.
• Only very little is known about how to change these social conditions systematically via interventions.
• Wilkonson & Pickett (2009):
  • Impact of social inequality on various social and mental health problems including violence and crime
  • Routine data in 25 developed nations; related income parameters to parameters of social and health-related problems
  • The level of income inequality (and not average income) correlates closely with the level of social and health-related problems: The stronger the difference in the income within one nation (as masured by comparing the richest 20 % with the poorest 20 %), the greater the social and health-related problems.
• Even implying the best individual prevention measures will fail to counter negative developmental dynamics when societal factors outweigh the impact of individual programs or at least seriously constrain their effects.
• Individual prevention measures need to be supplemented by working toward a societal system focused on social equality rather than social difference The increasing gap between rich and poor seems to be a cardinal problem impacting on the outcome and implementation of any prevention measures.

The What, the How, and the Who of Empowerment: Reflections on an Intellectual History

Which four domains are helpful in defining the term "empowerment" more closely? How can these domains be described in each case?

Level of Analysis

Individual/Psychological Level

• Distinguish between psychological empowerment and individual-only conceptions
  • Psychological empowerment: Involves person-environment fit and considers context and influences from factors operating on other levels of analysis
  • Individual-only conceptions: Focus on traits, pay little attention to context or other levels of analysis, and may conflict with empowerment theory in general
• Often aspects of empowerment were used to define empowerment writ large
  • Self-efficacy: Developing a sense of personal power, strength, or mastery that aids in increasing one's capacity to act.
    • Westernized construct built on the premise that a simple belief in one's ability to achieve a certain outcome is both sufficient and desirable.
    • Such conception of empowerment fails to recognize that psychological empowerment is bookended by establishment of goals and realization of real-world impacts of effort toward those goals. It also ignores the various dynamics between the oppressed and oppressive agents, structures and systems.
    • Blame the victim: Holds the individual accountable for not being empowered due to her or his lack of motivation or skills instead of addressing the roots of larger social inequities.
  • Besides self-efficacy as a subprocess of empowerment there are much more like development of critical consciouseness and involvement with others, which extends this type of individual sense of power to the larger community.
  • Critical awareness: Catalyzes individuals to identify specific factors that promote empowerment like additional skills, access to financial capital, access to other resources and opportunities, and access to individuals or spaces with greater power.

Organizational Level

• Empowerment on organizational level: Ways in which organizations facilitate psychological empowerment as well as ways in which organizations themselves can be empowered.
• Intraorganizational (e.g., supporting organization members)
• Interorganizational (e.g., buliding coalitions with other organizations)
• Extraorganizational (e.g., making change outside the organization in the community)
• Organization-unit empowerment: The organization has access to, control of, and influence over sufficient resources to function effectively, ethically, and sustainably in its environment.
• Organizational characteristics derived from positive core characteristics of empowering community settings along with the psychological mediators through which these characteristics operate: Group-based belief system, positive core activities, a supportive relational environment, opportunity role structure, leadership and members or staff, and setting maintenance and change.
• Mutual empowerment (or coempowerment) and collaboration that yields organizational synergy
  • When the organizational culture promotes the empowerment of multiple groups within the organization and those groups work well together, the organization is empowering and likely to be effective.
• Inclusion of members and groups in organization-wide communication networks
  • Circles of multiple weak ties overlap to counter tendencies to separate by occupation or organizational sector.
• Organizational ideology: Affects how empowering an organization can be to its members, as well as how long-lived the organization will be.
• Trust as a relevant interpersonal factor for organizational empowerment

Community Level

• Three components of community empowerment
  • Intracommunity components
  • Interactional components
  • Behavioral components
  • These components focus on social relations and ties among community members, both individual and organizational, and the action they take together to change their community.
• Community empowerment (Institute for Community Empowerment): Community members learn to organize so they can take part in improving their communities and then doing so.
  • Community organizing can be an effective participation tool for social change.
• Community Empowerment (WHO): Process whereby communities increase control over the factors and decisions that affect them.
  • Works through increasing the community's influence over the structures and forces that affect the lived experiences of the community and its members.
  • Increase in influence occurs through partnerships between those in power and other community members.
• Qualities for building community power:
  • Community participation, leadership, agency, self-efficacy and collective efficacy, capacity building, and sense of responsibility.
  • Critical perspective: Building community means facing issues of oppression, privilege, and power.
• Community empowerment may also mean members of the community becoming empowered with the help of the community. A community can control important aspects of its resources, life, and functioning; and at times, the two are clearly linked.
• Community empowerment is important for communities rebuilding after trauma.

Societal Level

• Empowerment is also concerned with equitable distribution of resources; attention to material and political empowerment on the societal level is crucial.
• Empowerment interventions on other levels must take broader structural, societal forces into account.
  • Like: Systemic racism, sexism, cissexism, homophobia, ableism, ageism, classism
• Three forms of societal empowerment
  • Intrasocietal
    • Societal processes and structures affecting the empowerment of individuals, organizations, and communities.
    • To what extent does a society foster equity and provide support to those within it who have less than their fair share of resources.
    • Empowering society: Works to distribute resources equitably as well as effectively.
    • Policies, practices, vioces of indiviudals, organizations, and communities.
  • Society-wide
    • How well work key components of society so that the society has adequate resources and uses them wisely to address its needs in cultural, governmental, political, business, educational, health, and other major spheres of activity?
  • Extrasocietal empowerment
    • The society has efficacious relationships with and is respected by other societies.
    • Can constructively influence and work with other societies regarding matters of shared concern.

Interplay Between Levels

• At each level, actors may develop resources that can be leveraged to push existing structures and brokers to make changes that would afford a more equitable distribution of power.
• A reciprocal relationship often exists between the development of power at more and less macro levels of empowerment.
• As there may be iterative empowerment processes at one level, there may also be multiple empowerment processes occurring (or not occurring) across levels.
• Exploring community narratives builds and maintains community identity and memories, which can empower community members and in turn the community at large.
• Empowerment at one level does not necessarily portend empowerment at other levels.

Focal Processes and Outcomes

Relational Processes

• Views of empowerment vary in the extent to which they emphasize intrapersonal and relational processes.
• Power and empowerment are mostly conceptualized as relational: Power is shaped by the relationships of people to other people, to their culture and to their environments, which are in turn shaped by distributions of resources that could be equitable but often are not.
  • Power can be conceptualized as a relationship among several actors in a setting who are interested in the same resource rather than as a position or as a property held by an individual.
    • These relationships can be seen as a site for positive social change in the dynamics and hierarchical structure of power.
  • Social relationships in the concept of reciprocal empowerment: Give power and control to those individuals who are in a more disadvantaged position moderates the pursuit of individual power.
  • Relational empowerment: An extension of psychological empowerment based on the premise that power is built and exercised through relationships.
  • Three dominant conceptions of power in community psychology
    • Social power
    • Psychopolitical power
    • Relational power
    • Power: A structural phenomenon, in which "power over" derives from "occupying an advantageous position within the pattern of relationships through which resources are exchanged".

Psychological and Sociopolitical Outcomes

• Psychosocial and sociopolitical views of empowerment
  • Popular education as empowerment
    • Three core principles: Cultural dominance, realities and concerns of local communities, and self-determination
      • Value the participation of those typically excluded from the benefits of education
      • Speak to the importance of empowering oppressed groups and foreshadow empowerment
    • Sociocultural dimensions of popular education emphasize that If culturally dominant groups control the educational system, than the potential to perpetuate the oppression of marginalized groups exists.
    • Political and democratic aspects of popular education emphasize he experiences and realities of communities rather than an overarching state agenda.
    • Popular education attends to the self-determination of marginalized peoples by affirming their diverse range of concerns and forms of resistance.
  • Control over one's life: Address psychosocial aspects of empowerment
    • Multilevel view of child empowerment
      • Psychosocial aspects of individual well-being such as self-efficacy, social support as well as feelings of belonging, mastery, and control
        • Internalized sense of empowerment
        • Can be achieved through positive relationships with empowered adults, involvement in age-appropriate decision making, ties with sources of identity, and a network of social and institutional support.
    • Building on strengths
    • Highlight processes of growth leading to outcomes like individual well-being
  • Citizen participation: Involves sociopolitical aspects
    • Underscore becoming critically aware of power in organizations, community, and society and how it is used and misused.
  • Both include relational processes with sociopolitical approaches likely giving more attention to those that involve some conflict and lead to social justice and equity in society.

Nature of Power

Power as a Construct

• Power as perception vs. reality of access to and control of resources
  • Empowerment theorists typically do not limit their understanding of power to its perception, but may give perceived power significant emphasis.
    • Social psychology and other research rely on surveys to measure power as equivalent to reality.
    • There are problems of individuals' misperceptions of their own power in organizational contexts, leading to defining and measuring power in other ways.
  • Power as control over one's own life and/or access to resources
  • Empowerment (Cornell Empowerment Group): Empowerment is an intentional, ongoing process … through which people lacking an equal share of valued resources gain greater access to and control over these resources. … By valued resources we are referring to political power, purchasing power, information, social support, and the skills that come from education, along with the accompanying social status.
    • Emphasizes the importance of both access to and control over resources (in contrast to the emphasis on self-efficacy or perceived sense of personal power).
  • When social desirability to appear more or less powerful is in effect, depending primarily exclusively on perceptions of power is unlikely to lead to an accurate understanding.

Power as a Variable

• Power as expandable, finite, or some combination
  • Finite or zero-sum models of power
    • Gains for one side are seen as resulting in corresponding losses for the other side
    • Reflects a Western, patriarchal interpretation of empowerment
    • Reflective of traditionally masculine ideas about power such as dominance and control
    • Distorts, ignores, and misrepresents empowerment's transformative potential
  • Expandable variable-sum model of power
    • Mutual gains are possible
    • Power can be generated through the process of empowerment, and powerful parties in society do not necessarily need to give up any of their power: "Power is not a scarce commodity but rather one that can be generated in the process of empowerment".
    • E.g., the development of critical consciousness at the individual level can lead to political organizing for sociopolitical change at the community and societal level.
  • But: An emphasis on variable-sum models has the potential to preclude an accurate analysis of situations in which resources are limited and a zero-sum model of power might be more appropriate
    • E.g., a political election with a limited number of voters and an organization's expenditure of a certain amount of monetary resources on only a subset of its important priorities.
  • Variable-sum models tend to be guided by an assumption that cooperation and collaboration are most facilitative of empowering outcomes
    • Working towards social justice often involves conflict, as power holders may not relinquish power without struggle
  • Variable-sum models might not adequately explain situations in which resources are limited. Conflict might be necessary in order to effect second-order change such as a new means of more fairly reallocating resources. Assuming a finite amount of power when the amount is flexible may lead to unnecessary conflict and disempowering processes.
  • Power may be constrained but not altogether finite
    • A marginalized group's power can expand until it reaches a level of visibility that attracts the attention of those in power.
    • This might be viewed as a threat to their control and they may seek to co-opt and/or limit the power of the marginalized group.
    • In international community health, some consider the amount of power to be at least somewhat constrained.
    • If community members increase their influence and control, others previously in charge will need to share or reduce their power.
    • Part of the challenge for those seeking to become empowered and their allies is to find ways to redefine the situation to change what counts as power and how it is distributed and used.

Context

• Context may be temporal as well as physical, normative, conceptual, and psychological.
• Power is contextual, so it is important to consider that a combination of history, location, culture, ideology, systemic linkages, and other contextual features shape empowerment and lack of it for individuals, organizations, communities, and societies.
• Views of empowerment vary in the extent to which they consider the broader ecology within which the conceptualization of empowerment is situated.
  • Minimal attention: Person-setting and relational aspects of empowerment
  • Substantial attention: Liberation psychology perspective; usage of social and psychological analyses to understand how oppression of women has been affected by and manifested in the Irish context.
• Contexts can promote or suppress empowerment of their inhabitants by fostering or limiting their ability to develop and exercise power.
  • Organizations that granted members decision-making power promoted the psychological empowerment of the individuals involved in the organization.
  • Organizational settings best empower individuals by enabling them to be public citizens who can provide their unique perspectives to larger discussions of individual and community needs.

How is empowerment defined on the individual/psychological level by Zimmerman and Eisman (2017) and McWhirter (1991), respectively? What are the similarities and differences between the two definitions?

• Empowerment (Zimmerman & Eisman, 2017): A tripartite combination of a sense of control, critical awareness of one's environment, and efforts to accomplish goals and affect outcomes.
• Empowerment (McWirther, 1991): A process by which people become aware of power dynamics, develop skills for gaining control, exercise control, and support empowerment of others.
• Similarities: Control, awareness
• Differences:
  • Sense of control vs. gaining and exercising control
  • awareness of environment vs. awareness of power dynamics
  • efforts towards goals and outcomes vs. exercise control and support empowerment of others

Which strategies for promoting individual empowerment are mentioned in the text?

Training, developing advocacy skills, studying, becoming self-efficacious, pursuing resources and opportunities, and gaining entry into previously inaccessible spaces.

Which indicators for community empowerment are mentioned in the text?

Indicators of community empowerment include processes such as collective reflection, social participation, and political discussion, and outcomes such as obtaining adequate resources for community well-being and social justice.

What is meant by "extracommunity empowerment"?

• Community affecting the larger society
• May take the form of communities supporting and influencing one another and of communities working to effect change in public policy at the state and national levels
  • Example: Oak Park Exchange Congress
    • Network of older suburbs near large U.S. cities
    • Supported one another in fostering harmonious racial diversity through integrated housing and living
• May take the form of influencing society more generally
  • Example: LGBT community
    • Fought to increase societal acceptance of diverse sexual and gender orientations in general, as well as legal matters such as marriage in particular

Why is it so difficult to define "empowerment" precisely?

• The term Empowerment is intended to be malleable, since power takes many forms in different situations with different people at different times.
• It's meaning varies depending on the level (or levels) of analysis and the interaction (or interactions) considered, the processes and outcomes prioritized, the underlying view of power and the relevant context.
• Such a definition may not be helpful because of the multiple, and sometimes conflicting, circumstances in which the term is used.
• Four central domains:
  • Level of analysis and their interaction
  • Processes and outcomes
  • The nature of power
  • Context
• Perspectives on empowerment benefit from explicitly addressing the issues raised above in each of these four domains.

Describe Hur's (2006) five-phase model. What are the criticisms of this model mentioned in the text?

Step 1: Existence of a Social Inequality

• When there exists a relative differential in the distribution of social, psychopolitical, and/or relational power, individuals may become cognizant of their power deficits in relation to others.
• Relies on a critical awareness of the environment and a cognizance of one's self-interests.
  • Enables the "actor" to recognize one's position in relation to the distribution of power and the position of others in relation to oneself in this distribution.
  • Coincide with a cognizance of the impacts of these power deficits, including cognitive and emotional consequences of disempowerment, such as low self-esteem, low success expectancies, and low motivation, and also limited opportunities.
  • Is associated with a belief that the actor deserves better and that a better condition is possible.
    • Absent this belief, the actor may be too oppressed to transform awareness of inequality into action to change the balance of power.

Step 2: Becoming Critically Aware/Conscientizing

• Analysis of how structures limit the individual and group experience, how these limitations are related to the proliferation of powerlessness, and what changes are necessary in order to have increased control over one's lived experience and opportunities.
  • May occur at individual, organizational, community, or societal level.
  • A multitude of potential inequities may exist
  • Determinants of power sought by one individual, organization, community, or society may be markedly different from those sought by others
• Development of critical consciousness as the most salient components of empowerment
  • Development of critical consciousness is intrapersonal and relational
  • Involves increasing an awareness of how sociopolitical structures affect individual and group circumstances and enhancing one's own critical analyses of power.
  • Critical consciousness means identifying with similar others and feeling a sense of responsibility to respond to justice.

Step 3: Mobilization for Action

• Actors begin to encourage others to join their movement toward increased power.
• Parallels with becoming involved with others of a similar position or experience, which can be facilitated through informal or formal contexts, such as mutual aid, self-help, or voluntary organizations.
• Actors begin to move toward collective action and organizational or community empowerment by educating others about their state of oppression and disempowerment.
• They may begin to push the existing systems for increased agency and access to power, building toward structural change and associated empowerment.
• May include additional consciousness raising, increasing participation through community organizing, skill acquisition, resource acquisition, conferral of positions of power, accessing previously unavailable knowledge/expertise, and access to a wider network of social contacts.
• These are first-order changes: They are of value both in themselves and for what they may engender.
• The conscientized actors seek to share their understanding and thus their power with those who join their collective action.

Step 4: Maximizing

• Those who are becoming empowered move toward equalization of power and become nearly indistinguishable from those who already have power.
• As more resources are shared, the empowerment relationship becomes increasingly reciprocal.
• Further development of increased agency, self-efficacy, and wellness
• Increased sense of possibility for change moves toward lager, structural change, including the acquisition of decision-making power and social capital.
• Achievement of initial goals and second order, transformative change becomes more likely.

Step 5: Creating a New Social Order

• A transformation of old institutions and structures that perpetuated a status quo where power was inequitably shared into new ones where those who have been empowered can continue to maintain and increase their control over their own lives.
• Social oppression is overcome and social justice is achieved.
• It's an aspirational stage as much as one that is likely fully accomplished.

Criticisms

• Stage theory
• Empowerment is an iterative process, wherein those who move through the process may move back to previous steps, albeit with new experiences and accordingly new perspectives on power.
• Someone can be oppressed in one context but act as an oppressor in another.
• Individuals, organizations, communities, or societies cannot be only identified as completely "oppressed" or "empowered", but rather that the level of empowerment varies as a combination of one's role as oppressed and oppressor.
• Empowerment is contextual or ecological and varies according to goal.
• And becoming empowered is rarely a one-way path of progress. Setbacks happen, often with some frequency.
• Neither one's varied roles as oppressed or oppressor, nor context, purpose, or setbacks play a major role in the stage model of Hur (2006).

What negative effects can arise when a person or group becomes aware that they are systematically disadvantaged?

• Potential difficulties of conferring power to others, when one has acquired it
  • The system which initially created the power differential attempt to maintain that differential
  • Even when one group seek to share power with another, the system is still maintained
  • Parties external to the relationship between the two groups, and to some extent the group members themselves, accept existing power differences, ignoring the attempts to confer or share power with the lese empowered group.
  • This external ecology often reinstates the power difference, even as there appeared to be a shifting of power from the perspective of those sharing power and those with whom power is being shared
  • Inclusive leadership and collaboration between previously conflicting groups may lead to coempowerment and organizational synergy.

What is meant by "intersectionality" and why is this construct important when supporting the empowerment of a community?

Intersectionality

• Power and privilege function on multiple axes of identity, such as race, class, disability, sexual orientation, age, and gender, and these multiple axes may create complex processes of empowerment.
• There may be multiple types of power sought due to multiple marginalizations, potential loss of some forms of power that is held due to privileged statuses, and varying forms of change necessary to foster this empowerment.
• Intersectionality: Various forms of oppression are interlocking and experienced simultanously. It was in the synthesis of theses oppressions and privileges that the context for one's life was created.
• An intersectional analysis recognizes the complex, interactive relationship between different oppressions and the resultant particular space in affected people.
• Efforts to empower marginalized groups must acknowledge the complexity of the stressors and related factors that limit their control over their lives.
• Marginalized groups often experience both interpersonal and structural forms of inequality and oppression. These systems of oppression impose barriers to marginalized people exercising control over their lives and maintain limiting narratives about marginalized people's potential and their values more generally.

Importance

• It is important to recognize existing strengths that can lead to empowerment.
• The use of multiple strategies may be necessary to empower marginalized groups.
• It may be useful to begin by building on existing self-esteem of members of marginalized groups and producing and enhancing affirming counternarratives to oppressive ideas about the group
• Barrier to use intersectional lens: The failure to acknowledge the full humanity of marginalized people.
  • Persons with disabilities are often viewed in reductionist ways.
  • Their relationships, including those in which they are provided care, may become paternalistic rather than empowering.
  • Aging adults may be infantilized by caretakers as they reach the end of life.
  • To avoid this, it is critical to stress mutuality in relationships and participation in decision-making.
    • Allows individuals to receive support while also maintaining their power and without diminishing their self-determination.
    • It is important that those receiving assistance or support be afforded the respect to choose and to have their choices implemented in a way that maintains their personal power.
• Understanding the complexity of factors that disempower diverse, marginalized people and considering their full humanity creates space for these communities to build important social resources like sense of community and community connectedness without diminishing the value of their individual members.
  • Increasing access to social and physical spaces from which group members have previously been denied access is critical in the empowerment of persons with disabilities.
    • Facilitates being able to more fully interact with the larger community, increasing their visibility, their voices, and their social connectedness.
  • Increasing community connection is useful for promoting empowerment and health protective behaviors among people living with HIV/AIDS.
    • Many feel isolated and may experience a degree of self-blame. Increasing community connection serve as an avenue to restore a sense of belonging, reduce victim status, promote the sharing of useful knowledge, and build self-efficacy.

Why is it not enough to legalize same-sex couples, i.e. H. for example, with regard to the right to marry ("marriage for all") or the right to adopt children, to give mixed-sex couples equal status in order to empower homosexuals in Germany?

• Although this would clear legal hurdles and make formal family planning easier, the marginalization of same-sex couples is more complex.
• It is a measure that affects the societal level, but only indirectly affects other levels.
• In particular, the psychosocial level at which prejudices lead to marginalization and discrimination is not affected.
• Participation in the selection of options takes place primarily at the interpersonal level, and this is also not affected by the measure.
• The measure also does not enable or promote community organization.
• The predominant idea of family is that of mixed-sex couples with biological children of their own. Same-sex couples can therefore be viewed as deviant or psychologically flawed and thus continue to be treated unfairly, isolated or ostracized.
• Long-term empowerment of marginalized groups requires the deconstruction of social norms regarding the intrinsic evaluation and characterization of communities with low hegemonic power.
• As new norms are adopted, members of a marginalized group who share qualities from the powerful group may become empowered more quickly than their peers.

Why is a higher number of women in parliament only partially suitable for empowering women?

• Empowerment: Ability to make choices.
  • Powerful people: Have always had access to choice
  • Empowered people: Necessitated a change to gain the ability to make choices (e.g., women)
• Individual of a marginalized group: Only obtaining the ability to choose may not produce meaningful and lasting change.
• Oppressing characterizations of one's group may be long-lasting parts of the larger culture codified in policies, structures, and other ways that limit agency.
• Long lasting empowerment of marginalized groups may require the deconstruction over time of societal norms related to the intrinsic value and characterizations of communities without hegemonic power.
• As new norms are adopted, members of a marginalized group who share qualities with powerful groups may become empowered more quickly than some of their peers.
• Due to intersectionality this runs the risk of misperceiving the empowerment of an individual or a subset of a group as the empowerment of the entire group.
• Often members of other marginalized groups are also members of lower socioeconomic statuses.
• Lack of access to economic power may prevent members of these groups from pursuing the education and skills necessary for increasing their more general power.
• Classism: Negative perceptions of people with lower SES
  • Thwart being accepted into the networks vital to their empowerment.
  • 3rd Millennium Development Goal: Gender equality and the empowerment of women
  • Increase women's representation in national parliaments
  • These women are rarely representative of the lower socioeconomic classes.
  • They will not be any more responsive to the priorities of women in poverty than are privileged men.
  • Moreover, there has been concern over how much control husbands and other powerful men have in decisions in the families and communities of low-income women. Such male dominance may chill prospects that increase legislative representation of women of privilege will have meaningful impact on the empowerment of poor women.
  • In intersectional lens and an awareness of related family and community context are needed that in this instance consider both SES and family/community norms as well as gender.
• Tokenism: The inclusion of the privileged portion of a marginalized group May be misunderstood as empowerment of group members overall.

Community-Based and Participatory Action Research: Community Psychology Collaborations Within and Accross Borders

Which terms for participatory research methods are mentioned in the text?

• Action research (AR)
• Participatory research (PR)
• Participatory action research
• Participatory rural appraisal
• Antiracist, feminist, and/or critical participatory action research
• Community interventions
• Community-based participatory research (CBPR)

Which differences are there between participatory research and "usual" psychological research?

Iterative Performances and Outcomes of Community Psychologists and Participatory Action Researchers

• More participatoy research
  • Relationality/participation/partnership
    • Participatory, collaborative coresearchers
  • Actions/levels of change
    • Processes
    • Institutional and/or structural change
    • Iterative cycles of action-reflection that generate personal and social transformation
  • Research/knowledge appreciation and construction
    • Local and/or indigenous multiple intelligences
    • Inductive, constructivist iterative knowledge generation processes
    • Trustworthiness, believability (Riessman, 2008)
    • Psychopolitical validity (Prilleltensky, 2008)
• More conventional research
  • Relationality/participation/partnership
    • Outsider researchers
  • Actions/levels of change
    • Outcomes
    • Individual and/or interpersonal change
    • Application of knowledge toward systemic change
  • Research/knowledge appreciation and construction
    • University-based “expert” knowledge
    • Objective, hypothetico-deductive knowledge generation processes
    • Internal–external validity and reliability

Differences Between Participatory Research and Conventional Research

• Participatory research emphasizes collaboration and partnership between researchers and community members, whereas typical psychological research often positions the researcher as the expert conducting research "on" participants.
• Participatory research values local, indigenous, and community knowledge and voices. Typical psychological research often privileges the knowledge and perspectives of academically trained researchers.
• Participatory research aims to take action and create change, in addition to generating knowledge. Typical psychological research is more focused on knowledge generation, with less emphasis on direct action.
• Participatory research embraces inductive, qualitative, and constructionist approaches to knowledge generation. Typical psychological research more often uses hypothetico-deductive, quantitative methods grounded in positivism/postpositivism.
• Participatory research emphasizes trustworthiness, credibility, and psychopolitical validity. Typical psychological research prioritizes internal/external validity and reliability.
• Participatory research attends to social inequalities, power dynamics, and structures of oppression. Typical psychological research often does not directly address or challenge systemic oppression.
• Participatory research seeks institutional/structural change and individual/interpersonal change. Typical psychological research more often focuses on individual outcomes.
• Participatory research emphasizes reflexivity, examining researchers' own privilege, power, and positionality. Typical psychological research does not tend to highlight researcher reflexivity to the same extent.
• Participatory research draws on feminist, critical, and postcolonial theories and frameworks. Typical psychological research does not usually engage these perspectives substantially.
• Participatory research utilizes creative methods like photography, art, theater, and storytelling. Typical psychological research relies more on surveys, experiments, and formal interviews.
• Participatory research takes place in community settings and engages community knowledge. Typical psychological research happens more often in university labs and clinical settings.
• Participatory research aims for sustainable community change over time through ongoing collaboration. Typical psychological research is a time-limited study not necessarily focused on sustainability.
• Participatory research recognizes the limitations of quantification and positivist ideas about "objectivity." Typical psychological research emphasizes quantification and positivist assumptions.

What are three typical goals of community-based research projects (Root, 2007)?

• Evaluate a community's current programs or policies

• Increase the member's ability to identify problems and develop plans to solve them

  • The text notes this goal aligns with participatory research's emphasis on engaging community knowledge and building community capacity. The PhotoPAR example shows how the photovoice process enabled Mayan women to identify problems and solutions related to the armed conflict.

• Make a case for a public policy favored by members of the community

  • The text mentions the PhotoPAR project resulted in the women publishing a book to document their experiences and demand justice, similar to an official truth-telling report. This relates to the goal of making a case for policy change.

• Additionally, the text states that community psychology interventions, community development projects, and policy change efforts resonate with participatory research's goals of analyzing power, developing interventions, and promoting change.

• However, the text also notes both participatory research and community psychology sometimes fall short of creating systemic, structural change despite intentions to do so. Scaling up remains a challenge.

What does "situated knowledge" mean according to Haraway (1988) and what does Haraway mean by "subjugated standpoints"?

• Haraway (1988) argued that all knowledge is local and subject to question.
• Situated knowledge: Sustained, rational, and objective inquiry is possible not through relativism but in the partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustained the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology.
• Haraways (1988) concept of objectivity privileges contestation, deconstruction, passionate construction, webbed connections, and hope for transformation of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing.
• Knowledge is deeply situated, contested, and contestable.
• Coresearchers: Engaging in daily practices, collaborating in a constant, ongoing, and accountable positioning and repositioning of themselves and each other vis-à-vis their everyday worlds.
• Subjugated standpoints: Standpoints of individuals and groups marginalized from power and resources because of structured inequities and institutionaliced and racialized oppressions.
  • They promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world.
• Historically located accounts of what is real, depend on a power-charged social relation of conversation and must be interrogated, contested, and deconstructed.
• All translation from within and outside these standpoints is partial, critical, and interpretive.

What are three demands Lykes and Hershberg (2012) make of participatory research?

• Lykes and Hershberg (2012) discussed tensions at the borders of feminisms and participatory and action research, pressing for an anti-racist methodology toward a more transformative praxis.
• Participatory and action research, in their opinion, must
  • Critically reposition gender, race, and class through its praxis
    • The text does not directly explain how Lykes and Hershberg arrived at this requirement. However, the text does emphasize engaging critical race, feminist, and postcolonial theories to interrogate power and privilege.
  • Recognize and value indigenous cultural knowledge and voices generated therein
    • The text reflects this by discussing projects that engaged Mayan and South African community knowledge through visual and arts-based methods.
  • Deploy intersectionality as an analytic tool for transformation
    • The text indirectly addresses this by discussing how postcolonial feminism examines the intersections of race, class, and gender in power relations.

What challenges arise from the fact that participatory research is now also being conducted by universities and large organizations? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this development?

• Power is all too frequently structured within participatory and action research processes that privilege voice of the outsider or university-based researcher and within the multiple and diverse relationships between researchers and community residents developed therein.
• Reflexivity is a resource for both acknowledging and critically interrogating outsider research privilege and insider researcher positionality at the intersection of multiple systems of oppression.
• These structural inequities are reinscribed in particularly problematic ways when, for example, whites, heterosexuals and/or men have neither deconstructed their privilege nor prioritized the problematization of power within the participatory and action research processes.
• It challanges to deconstruct the multiple wayse in which we internalized racialized superiority as it intersects with our race, education, income, university base, and other factors within circulation of power that possess and dispossess.
• Participatory action research processes are being increasingly institutionalized in schools and university curricula, government requests for proposals, international organizations and NGOs.
• Raise the concern that participatory action research and CBPR became depoliticized tools that belie their emancipatory origins within the Global South and may even contribute to the marginalization of women, indigenous communities, and racialized minorities, some of the very constituencies with whom those who engage participatory and action research sought to collaborate toward transformative change.
  • According projects function as systems of control and discipline, bening or exploitative … [while] allegedly addressing progressive concerns around Third World development, debt, impoverishment, and inequality … peddling empowerment, justice, and human rights while simultanously working toward depoliticizing the politics of pain … often generated by market-state violence
• Neocolonial powers in the Global North institutionalized a set of knowledge production strategies that reproduce colonial power, contributing to the neutering of the political intent and definition of participatory action research … processes committed to the interests of a popular pedagogical and knowledge project of, from, by, and for marginalized … social groups.
• Participatory and action research compromised some of its more emancipatory and transformative goals, at least in part to gain legitimacy within the university and research communities and capture much needed funding to support community-based, educational, and NGO-based projects

Two studies in the paradigm of action research

Artist Proof Studio (APS-) Program in South Africa

Goals

• Sought to address some effects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic through partnering with local communities - women
• Programs that broke silence, generated networks of support, and built income generating capacity of local participants through crafts production projects
• Develop a multilayered program for the scholars, students, activists and project participants, wherein each member could learn to democratize rather than colonize learning
• Identified local resources and fused them with the arts to enhance local capacity to respond to some of the multiple psychosocial and material consequences of the pandemic where some communities lost up to half of their membership due to HIV/AIDS
• Reducing the effects of HIV/AIDS on impoverished communities and systematizing the local knowledge

Methods

• Over 200 workshops during 10 years
• Invited university-based researchers from the U.S. and artists from South Africa
• Principles of nonhierarchical participation and self-reflexivity
• Artists, researchers, community organizers, and social development practitioners collaborated through innovative and participatory methodologies to mobilize the arts to realize multiple objectives
• Education
• Arts-based participatory exercises through which participants could begin to share their stories and listen to those of their friends and family members
• Local knowledge being developed using the visual arts, narratives, and PhotoVoice (combination of photographs and their descriptions)
• University-community coresearchers documented processes through which local participants acquired and communicated knowledge about HIV/AIDS
  • Decolonizing methodology (wherein colonized voices are centered)
  • Popular education decoding strategies
  • Participatory action research
  • PhotoVoice
• Paper Prayers: Participants expressed their losses, despair and, eventually, hope through the writing of prayers on locally produced paper, as they struggled to peel away layers of denial

Results

• Women developed capacities to generate income from their craft productions and embraced local traditions and creative techniques, through wich they generated new ways of supporting each other through participatory community actions
• Arts and Paper Prayers enabled women to generate endogenous images and narratives through which they could reimagine the possibility of a future and support each other in the ongoing journey which has meant inevitable death for all too many of them
• Local educators, activists and caregivers within South Africa and beyond gained self-confidence to talk more openly about HIV/AIDS and skills to develop income-generating activities
• Extension to other challenges in S.A. like xenophobia, anti-immigrant violence, and violence against women
• APS collaborated with organizations to develop public murals and generated exhibits and educational art initiatives; seek to generate transformative change both within those who participate in the projects and the communities with whom they collaborate
• The Paper Prayers processes transformed the insider-outsider dialectic of coresearchers, refashioned discourse of power, and exemplified the personal and community based transformative potential of participatory and action research

Obstacles and challenges

• Outsider collaborators have to deconstruct their power as a colonial Self and the normative expectations of the northern research and development community to document impact through quantitative research strategies
  • Questionnaires to secure some quantitative evidence
  • Prioritizing qualitative strategies that allowed for excavating local cultural practices local cultural practices through which participants could express their lived experiences
• The understanding of time pressures from within the university and conceptions of time within the local communities were not always synchronous

PhotoPAR Project in Guatemala

Goals

• Break silence, generate knowledge, and respond to some of the multiple effects of armed conflict in rural communities in Guatemala
• Multiyear process through which the local community could document its story of how women coresearchers broke silence about the past, toward generating a better future for themselves and their children

Methods

• Drawings and photography
• Participatory workshops and participatory action research
• Women of a village in the northern Quiché in Guatemala represented themselves through two collective drawings, one representing their lives during the armed conflict and before they had participated in community workshops, and another, after the workshops
• When presenting these collective drawings to each other, the women spoke of the gross violations of human rights visualized through the drawing
• Maya represented their lived experiences in Photography and, in participatory processes, the generated previously unknown situated knowledges.
• PhotoPAR was designed within an ongoing economic development and community-organizing project
• Collaborative experience of accompaniment of Maya Ixil and K'iche' women during and after the 36-year armed conflict
• U.S. univerity-based psychologists facilitated Mayan coresearchers engagement in iterative action-reflections processes
  • Analysis of individual photographers' phototexts
  • Crafted from Mayan women's photographs, paired with the stories the photographer had generated from interviews with the person(s)
  • Small groups coded the context, the actors or people involved, their feelings, actions, and thoughts, and the reasons, causes or explanations for the event(s)
• Theater and creative storytelling
  • Women performed listening processes through which they "hear[d] each other into speech", offering solace as well as psychosocial accompaniment
• Data gathering and interpretation were procedures of conscientization through which participants developed critical consciousness, negotiated situated knowledges toward a shared story

Results

• Developing capacity of women living in rural villages 12 hours from the capital city to break the silence about gender violence in armed conflict
• Coresearchers listened to each others' experiences, as well as those from more rural villages where multiple massacres and massive displacements had occurred, while deepening analytic and negotiation skills as they collaboratively developed collective stories of the armed conflict and some of its multiple effects
• Coresearchers identified their varied, sometimes conflicting understanding of the racism and economic inequalities underlying the armed struggle and the military's scorched earth policies
• Participants developed critical consciousness, negotiated situated knowledges toward a shared story
• Women performed multiple self-understandings, increased self-confidence and participatory skills, and built capacity for running local organizations and developing economic projects
• Products or outcomes that were frequently performed in public spaces by the coresearchers, including the publication of a book
  • It constitutes a truth-telling report, conveying to people in Guatemala City and beyond what happened to them, and demanding that it will never happen again
  • The sale of the book contributed to the women's ability to sustain an educational project for children and youth and various economic development initiatives
  • They enhanced their capacities, revealed in the book's production and in the Mayan coresearchers' design and facilitation of participatory workshops with women in the rural villages surrounding Chajul

What difficulties/challenges are there in such research programs? Advantages and disadvantages?

Lessons Learned from Action Research Projects

• Cross and contest borders of racialization, gender, social class, sexualities, and abilities
• Solidarity took shape in dialogical relationships formed within the context of ever-present histories of colonization wherein white, privileged, university-based researchers sometimes exercised power in more subtle ways
• Participatory and action research in contexts of extreme poverty and gross violations of human rights require integrated approaches which draw on economic development principles and practices
• Interdisciplinarity
• Postpositivist norms constrain how coresearchers seeking external funding assess change or impact resulting from their studies.
• These methods may generate greater confidence from funders but also threaten situated knowledge generation processes
• Despite both project's reach into regional, national and international actions, discussions, and policy-making through publications, professional presentations, and testimonies in legal and congressionally based initiatives, they fall short of realizing structural change.
• No challenge to neoliberal global capital, for example.
• Scaling up remains a critical challenge

General Challenges

• Participatory action research coresearchers are challenged to develop relationships of just enough trust through which to engage in collective and iterative action-reflection processes in spaces forged through negotiation and power-sharing over time
• Coresearchers and community members are challenged to critically interrogate their respective and ralative power(s) in contexts where the former all too frequently risk reinscribing knowledge(s) form the North rather than becoming coconstructors of new knowledge(s) from the bottom up.
• It is much less typical for researchers to reflexively interrogate how their privilege as, for example, white, university-educated, internationalists introduces exogenous accountability systems that may, at a minimum, disproportionately benefit them and, at a maximum, distort the knowledge(s) being coconstructed through these collaborations
• Resources can only be developed over time, recognizing the diverse cultural and professional understadings of time that must also be iteratively discovered and operationalized
• Develop interdisciplinary collaborative and community-based AR teams that respect the discipline's constructivist turn and are responsive to the lived experiences of coresearchers including their material needs
• Pay particular attention to the skills, possibilities, limitations, and nature of community-based coreserachers' participation due at least in part to the impoverished and/or marginalized conditions in which they live and/or to their indigenous beliefs and local cultural practices
• Coresearchers' challenging multiple systems of power and locally gendered structures and redressing social inequalities through the active inclusion of women and their stories in community decision making

Giving Voice - and the Numbers, too: Mixed Methods Research in Community Psychology

Which definition of "mixed methods research" is presented in the text?

• Johnson, Onwuegbuzie, and Turner (2007) reviewed the most influential conceptualizations in the field to derive a common, synthesized definition
• Mixed methods research is the type of research in which a researcher or team of researchers combined elements of qualitative and quantitative research approaches (e.g., use of qualitative and quantitative viewpoints, data collection, analysis, inference techniques) for the broad purposes of breadth and depth of understanding and corroboration.

What was the original focus of mixed methods research approaches? Why and to what extent has this changed over time?

• Historically: More emphasis on the corroboration element
  • Campbell & Fiske (1959) about convergent and discriminant validity by the multitrait-multimethod matrix
  • Denzin (1978) about sociological methods: The use of mixed methods as a strategy for triangulation
    • Using different methods to collect data on the same subject to compare and contrast findings to see if the results converge
    • Can strengthen confidence in the accuracy and validity of one's findings, particularly because between-methods triangulations cancel out the biases inherent in each method
  • Corroboration implies that there is an objective, known world of "truths" to be discovered and verified, and the rise of constructivist theories of social science in 1980s and 1990s challenged this fundamental assumption. The utility of mixed methos was questionable
  • Mixed methods have the potential to bring about more nuanced understanding of social phenomena
• Mixed methods provide diverse perspectives on a phenomenon of interest, whereas the use of any single method, however complicated, is unlikely to yield as much detail.

What are the five main purposes of mixed methods designs according to Greene, Caracelli, and Graham (1989)?

• Triangulation: Using different methods to collect data on the same subject to compare and contrast findings to see if the results converge
• Complementarity: To elaborate, illustrate, and/or clarify findings generated by one method with the other
• Development: To use results from one method to inform the other method
• Initiation: To discover contradictions and paradoxes and to develop new perspectives and frameworks
• Expansion: To push the boundaries on the breadth and depth of inquiry by using different methods for different components of a project

What are four additional reasons for using mixed methods designs mentioned in the text?

• Collins, Onwuegbuzie, and Sutton (2006) added still more compelling reasons for using mixed methods designs
• Mixed methods con foster participant enrichment (participant recruitment and selection into a study)
  • Formative mixed methods studies can be instrumental in learning how to access and develop trusting relationships with different diverse and heterogenous sectors of a community
• Mixed methods projects can be useful for determining whether existing measures are culturally meaningful and contextually grounded for the target population.
• The use of qualitative methods within quantitative randomized control intervention trials can be helpful in assessing treatment fidelity and treatment integrity.
  • Qualitative methods can readily capture drift from a planned intervention, as well as identify how an intervention could be modified for subsequent phases of a project.
• Mixed methods can foster significance enhancement, meaning that the significance of an intervention ought to be construed more broadly than its statistical significance and that integrated analyses and interpretations can provide richer data on a social program's potential effectiveness.

Incompatibility thesis

• Methods cannot be combined and integrated within and between studies because of fundamental conflicts between positivist and constructivist models.
• Guba (1987): Just as surely as the belief in a round world precludes belief in a flat one.

What are four ways of dealing with the incompatibility thesis mentioned in the text?

Aparadigmatic Stance

• Aparadigmatic stance: Methods and paradigms are independent
• In real world practice, methods can be separated from the epistemology out of which they emerged.
• Theoretical "navel gazing" was seen as distracting and unhelpful to the actual practice of social science research.
• The so-called requirement that theory and methods line up was best left ignored.

Sinlge Paradigm Stance

• The adoption of a single paradigm that could theoretically accommodate multiple methods
• Postrealist pragmatism was heralded as a theoretical solution because of its emphasis on practice and method over theoretical cogitation
  • The research question is paramount and must drive the selection of methods, which would be expected to vary within and across studies.
• Other views are Critical Realism and transformative paradigms
• Community Psychology: Post-realist perspectivism
  • Reality and knowledge are situated or contextual
  • Multiple methods are necessary to capture best approximations of the 'truth'
  • Methodological traditions are different strategies for capturing truth, each with inherent advantages and disadvantages

Dialectic, Multipragmatic Approach

• All paradigms are presumed to have merit.
• Allowing multiple theoretical models to guide a study is beneficial, so long as researchers engage those tensions through explicit reflection and engagement.
• Community Psychology
  • Quantitative methods, so often thought of as "top down" strategies that obfuscate complexities, could in fact be used in "bottom up" ways that are well-suited for capturing contextual details, which was, supposedly, the unique domain of qualitative methods
  • Conceptualize methods along a continuum of particularistic to holistic (rather than quantitative to qualitative), inviting discussion about when and why different approaches are most useful

Theoretical Plurality

• Different components of a study can be guided by different paradigms
• Design comes first, and researchers can "walk backwards" to its corresponding paradigms, allowing for multiple frameworks within a study.
• Community Psychology: Excellence in pluralistic inquiry (Barker & Pistrang, 2005, 2012)
  • Articulated evaluative standards applicable for quantitative research, for qualitative research, and for research from either or both traditions that seeks to embody the values and principles of community psychology

Taxonomy of mixed methods designs

• Designs can be created by varying what, when, how, and why quantitative and qualitative methods are combined

• TIMING

  • Simultaneous or Sequential
  • Simultaneous, Parallel, or Concurrent: Mixing occurs within the same study
  • Sequential: Mixing occurs across studies

• RELATIVE EMPHASIS

  • Primary, Supplemental, or Balanced
  • One approach (quantitative or qualitative methods) is predominant, while the other is used in a supplemental fashion
  • Both approaches are used more balanced with equal importance

• PURPOSE

  • Exploratory or Explanatory
  • Sort out why both methods are needed and what is hoped to be gained from their integration
  • Exploratory: Common in new areas of inquiry where there are no guiding frameworks, theories, measures, or instruments.
  • Explanatory: The findings generated through one method are unpacked further using a different method for a more complete understanding of the results
  • Triangulation: Seeking convergence and corroboration of findings across different methods studying the same phenomenon

• STAGE OF INTEGRATION

  • All Stages or Analysis Only
  • To date, most mixed methods studies have typically integrated data at the interpretation stage
  • Data from each method are analyzed in their own tradition and then the results are brought together during interpretation of the overall findings.

• More and more unusual blends of methods and techniques are emerging that do not necessarily fit existing design typologies --> case examples

What are the three main types of mixed methods designs?

Sequential Explanatory Mixed Methods Designs

Characteristics

• Begins with quantitative data collection and analysis, and then a follow-up qualitative component is conducted
• Purest application: Methods are distinct with respect to timing
  • The quantitative work is finished and the results generated from that method are then used to plan subsequent qualitative study
• Can be extended into a multistage application, whereby the cycle of quantitative, followed by qualitative data collection repeats
  • The second stage qualitative findings suggest an idea for a new quantitative study.
• Quantitative methods have greater emphasis, the purpose of including qualitative methods is to unpack or explain the statistical findings

Usage

• Useful in intervention research whereby the efficacy (or effectiveness) or the program is evaluated in a standard quantitative design and then the qualitative methods are used to help uncover the mechanism by which the program was effective
• Useful when the quantitative findings are unexpected and/or controversial, and a second-stage study, from a qualitative perspective, is necessary to dig deeper to understand what happened and why

Case Study: Psychological distress among Latino day laborers

• Negi (2013)
• Identify predictors of psychological distress among Latino day laborers (LDLs)
• Hypothesis: An identification of protective factors and risk factors for psychological distress has the potential to aid in the development of culturally responsive programs and services for LDLs
• Initial quantitative survey
  • 150 LDLs
  • Survey: Acculturation, discrimination, social isolation, religiosity, and psychological distress
• Qualitative member checking
  • The quantitative findings were shared during a focus group with five LDLs
  • Purpose: To further explain what was found in the survey results by contextualizing the findings with LDLs' lived experiences.
  • Participants' initial reactions to the data were recorded in addition to the identification, grouping, and interpretation of significant findings.
  • Qualitative validation of the quantitative findings
• Results
  • Quantitative findings: Psychological distress was predicted by discrimination and social isolation
  • Qualitative focus groups: Additionally, although religiosity and sending remittances back home were not found to be quantitatively significant, focus group participants emphasized the positive impact of these factors on their daily lives and mental health.
• Discussion: The mixed methods design provided the hows and whys of the relationship between LDLs' stress and mental health as critical information to develop targeted interventions
  • Quantitative work: "base" findings
  • Qualitative component: Unpacking the lived experience

Sequential Exploratory Mixed Methods Designs

Characteristics

• Qualitative methods begin the sequence, and on the basis of those findings, a follow-up quantitative study is conducted
• Can be extended into a multistage application, whereby the cycle of qualitative followed by quantitative data collection repeats
• Qualitative methods have primary importance and quantitative methods are used in a supplemental fashion
• One stage is fully executed before the second stage begins so that the findings build on each other across the project

Usage

• Start with exploratory qualitative work to learn about the new issue, population, setting etc. and use that formative work to design quantitative instruments
• Used in intervention research: The exploratory variation has utility as well in that the first stage of qualitative work could be used to help guide the development of the intervention itself and to form relationships with key stakeholders in the community, followed by quantitative evaluation of the program

Case Study: Housing for persons with serious mental illness

• Kloos & Shah (2009)
• How can housing and neighborhood environments promote adaptive functioning, health, and recovery for persons with serious mental illness (SMI)?
• Using a social ecological approach, they developed a conceptual framework for understanding the experiences of persons with SMI living in community settings
• Phase 1 - Qualitative interviews with persons with SMI
• Phase 2 - Quantitative survey: Items generated from these interview, in addition to items pulled from housing measures in other disciplines, were pilot tested
  • Housing Environment Survey (HES)
• Phase 3 - Qualitative methods to understand people's living experiences.
  • Participatory approaches: Research participants guided the researcher through their home environment
  • Visual ethnography: Document the living experiences of the participants
• Phase 4 - Quantitative Phase
  • Research participants created maps of where they participated in activities in their communities, than these maps were plotted using geographic information system (GIS) software to get a spatial understanding of their participation and experiences
• Results
  • Physical and social environments were influential to individual functioning
  • Better living conditions, better neighborhood upkeep, and more welcoming and tolerant social neighborhood climates were associated with lower psychiatric distress
  • Better living quality was also associated with positive coping and lower perceived stress

Concurrent Triangulation Mixed Methods Designs

Characteristics

• Quantitative data are collected at the same time a qualitative component is also underway
• Purest application: The methods are of equal importance because they are intended to provide independent perspectives on the phenomenon of interest, which are then compared and contrasted at the end of the study to determine whether findings triangulate across methods
• Implementation varies whereby some researchers make sure that the quantitative and qualitative components are conducted separately and independently, integrated only at the interpretation stage to determine if there are convergent findings
  • Others are less concerned about the traditionalist concept of contamination across methos and will allow interim findings form one method to inform the continued data collection in the other.

Usage

• Triangulation: The most common use of concurrent triangulation designs is to seek convergence and corroboration of findings across different methods studying the same phenomenon

Case Study: Promoting mental health among American Indian youth

• Goodkind et al. (2012)
• Developed and evaluated an intervention promoting to mental health of American Indian youth and their families
  • 6 months
  • 4 main components:
    • Recognizing and healing historical trauma
    • Reconnecting to traditional culture and language
    • Parenting/social skill building
    • Strengthening youth-parent relationships
• Qualitative component: Participants were interviewed at the beginning of the intervention, at a 3-month midpoint, at the end of the intervention, at a 6 month follow-up and at a 12 month follow-up
  • Those who attended at least 9 of the 27 sessions were included in the analysis
  • N = 18 youth, 13 families
• Quantitative component: Scales measuring recent exposure to violence, PTSD symptoms, enculturation, self-esteem, coping, quality of life, and social functioning
• Qualitative questions that extended beyond these scales provided insights into participants' experiences in the program, and these data could support or refute (i.e., triangulate) the quantitative findings
• Hypothesis: Enculturation, self-esteem, positive coping strategies, quality of life, and social functioning would increase during and after the intervention
• Results
  • Quantitative data largely supported the hypotheses
    • Significant increases in American Indian identity, self-esteem, positive-coping skills, quality of life, and social adjustment
  • Qualitative analysis confirmed these findings with reported increases in all domains
    • Expanded on the initial quantitative measures by revealing increased positive attitude and respect, increased social support, improved academic performance and decreased anger

Concurrent Nested Mixed Methods Designs

Characteristics

• Quantitative and qualitative methods are used simultaneously
• Nested designs have a clearly identifiable dominant method that guides the overall project and within that study, there is a smaller, simultaneous "mini project" that answers a complementary research question
• Nested designs use multiple methods to answer distinct (not the same, see triangulation) though complementary research questions

Usage

• Evaluation of intervention: Primary focus may be assessing key outcome variables, and the nested component might explore complementary questions about the life histories, community context, etc. of the population participating in the intervention using the other method

Case Study: Peer support intervention for school transition in Australia

• Ellis et al. (2009)
• Evaluated the impact of a peer support intervention on the physical, social, and mental well-being of young people as they transition into high school
• Over 1600 schools in Australia
• Assigns pairs of trained senior high school students (grades 10 & 11) to small groups of 8-10 seventh grade students
  • Trained high school leaders guide the seventh graders through program content and activities, including goal setting, group decision making, problem solving, and the development of support networks, over 12 weekly sessions
• Primary mode: Quantitative
  • Data were collected from seventh grade students across three schools over 2 years
  • Year 1 seventh graders (N = 478) comprised the control group, year 2 seventh graders (N = 452) comprised the experimental group
  • Surveys assessing self-concept, life effectiveness, coping, and perceptions of bullying
  • Three time points: Near start of the school year, prior to the start of the program; 6 month later, at the end of the program; and toward the end of the year
• Nested qualitative study
  • Provide insight into the experiences of the participants, and provide insight into issues not identified by the quantitative methods
  • Open-ended questions on the perceptions of the program and the leaders in the postintervention survey for seventh graders and the high school leaders in the experimental group
  • After completing the qualitative questionnaire, experimental group students were asked to participate in a focus group on the strengths and the weaknesses of the program.
    • N = 119 seventh graders and N = 44 leaders were randomly selected
• Results
  • Quantitative analyses
    • Students in the experimental group had significant positive changes for general school and verbal self-concepts, honesty/trustworthiness, opposite-sex relations, self-concept scores, cooperative teamwork, open thinking, and stress management
  • Qualitative analyses
    • Identified new themes: Student connectedness, problem solving ability, sense of self and possibility, school citizenship, and adjustment to high school

To what extent are mixed methods designs specifically useful for community psychology? Which values and goals of community psychology do Campbell et al. discuss in this regard in the text?

• Addressing key conceptual and ideological goals of the field, such as promoting interdisciplinary research, capturing context and diversity, and moving beyond the individual level of analysis
• Though community psychologists are using mixed methods designs, they rarely connect their work with the vast, ever-growing, and decidedly interdisciplinary literature on this topic
  • Most manuscripts do not specify the design used or the epistemological tradition that guided work, which is a missed opportunity for interdisciplinary dialogue
  • Connecting with the broader interdisciplinary literature will continue to be important as mixed methods scholarship has begun to focus on the utility of transformative and/or participatory approaches
  • Bringing mixed methods scholarship into our writing, and publishing our work in mixed methods journals, opens up new pathways for interdisciplinary collaboration
• Mixed methods is well-suited for capturing context and diversity
  • Mixed methods designs offer several options for this kind of careful, nuanced analysis
  • All too often, contextual nuances are missed because it is indeed hard to capture that information in studies defined by a single methodological paradigm
  • Bringing quantitative and qualitative methods together gives community psychologists many design options for an explicit analysis of context and diversity
• Mixed methods can be useful tool for empirically demonstrating the influence of extra-individual factors, which can be instrumental in shifting the discourse about social problem and how it is defined
• Though mixed methods designs do not guarantee higher-order assessments, they do offer a variety of options for multilevel investigations

What challenges and criticisms must be considered in the context of mixed methods designs?

• The designs can be resource-intensive given that they are essentially two studies in one
• If both components are not done well, then the design is not fully executed and quality of the work will suffer
• A "tag on" qualitative (or quantitative) piece will not help explicate the underlying phenomenon of interest
• If the conceptualization of the study is weak and the formative questions are not well-framed, more data - even if they are of different natures - will not magically reveal a richer, fuller understanding of the issues
• Mixed methods designs cannot correct for poor sampling, data collection, and assessment - or any other methodological weakness
• The methodological criteria of excellence for both traditions - quantitative and qualitative - must be adhered to, which means that researchers must seek out opportunities for training and practice in both methods

Methods for Multiple Levels of Analysis: Capturing Context, Change, and Changing Context

Why is the consideration of context so important in community psychology?

Consideration of Context as a Core Value of Community Psychology

• Consideration of context represents a core value of community psychology
• Theory and conceptual models: Explain how settings influence behavior, whereas policies and programs aim to alter environments in a way that promotes well-being of communities and their members.
• Community-based research and action: Focus on the complex interplay and interconnections within and between ecological levels, as well as dynamic change over time.
• Community theory and action: Postulate mechanisms through which environments shape behavior, as well as group interaction.
• Prevention efforts: Enhance setting-level capacities to support diverse groups and promote fit of individuals with contexts.

Ecological Theory of Social Systems

• Emphasizes the synergy between the individual and the setting.
• Social systems: Ecology comprised by interdependent individuals and their cumulative interactions.
  • They function through different levels.
• Structures: Provide opportunities and constraints for interactions within and between groups.
• Social Processes: Reflect bidirectional mechanisms through which individuals interact with settings.
• Interactions between structures and social processes function together to perpetuate the social dynamics of culture, diversity, and oppression.

Ecological Systems Theory/Bioecological Model

• Extension of ecological theory of social systems
• Focuses on the influence of settings in human development
• Nests human development within multiple and interconnected settings ranging in proximity to the individual
• More distal structures influence individual development directly and indirectly through proximal settings such as family, schools, or other local social settings.
• Interactions within and between levels of analysis also shape behavior over time.
• Human development represents a culmination of biological processes that drive and respond to multilevel environmental conditions

Systems Framework of Social Settings

• Expands focus from individual development to changing social contexts to promote collective well-being
• Settings vary in levels of functioning as experienced in transactions between individuals.
• Social interactions depend on resources and norms embedded within evolving social structures and social networks, and dynamic processes encourage predictable behavioral patterns within social contexts.
• To address the mechanisms that perpetuate social disparities, the systems framework emphasizes setting-level community action through policy, programs, and coordination of resources.

What procedures fall under the term "multilevel analysis" (multilevel modeling, MLM)?

• Mixed-effects models
• Random-effects models
• Hierarchical linear models
• Growth curve analysis
• Latent growth models
• Multilevel logistic regressions
• Latent class analysis

What is nested data and what do you have to consider when analyzing such data statistically?

• Nested data occur when smaller units exists within larger unit.
• Nested data refer to observed shared variability across natural groups and settings, such as divisions inherent to schools, neighborhoods etc.
• The concept of nesting applies more generally when individuals nested in settings, and units can be defined in flexible ways.
• Observations are no longer independent because people within the same group may be more similar to one another than to members of another group.
  • This dependence violates important assumptions of ordinary least squares regression and may bias parameter estimates
  • Traditional OLS regression is not appropriate to use with nested data.
• MLM models variability separately at each level and in effect includes the dependence as part of the analysis
  • Separate levels are simultaneously analyzed, which allows for the accurate testing of hypotheses regarding how settings shape individual outcomes

What can multilevel analyses be used for?

Separating Within- and Between-Group-Effects

• Test hypotheses that examine the interface of individuals in settings
• Individual-level variable is aggregated into a group-level variable
  • Research question of how variables are associated at individual (within-group) or group (between-group) levels of analysis.
  • Different patterns of association may emerge at different levels, and processes behind associations may be different for individual versus group effects.
  • Ecological fallacy: Incorrect assumption that associations at one level are the same at other levels.
    • Ecological theory: Processes may be different at different levels, or variables may carry different meaning at different levels of analysis.
    • Separating within- and between-group effects allows for the examination of how effects may be similar or different depending on the level of analysis.
• Within-group effects: Individual level, examine individual-level associations within each group which then are averaged across groups for the total within-group effect
  • Frog pond effect: Models examine how one's relative position in a group on the independent variable predicts the dependent variable
  • Group-mean centering of level 1 variables: Gives the relative position of a person within the group as the predictor variable.
• Between-group effects: Group level, examine patterns of correlations on the basis of average group scores.

Examining Contextual Effects

• Level 2 variables predict individual-level outcomes, while controlling for other level 1 variables
• Contextual questions of how setting characteristics may explain additional variance in the individual outcome, over-and-above individual characteristics.
• Any type of level 1 (e.g., personal characteristic) or level 2 variable (e.g., aggregated variables, setting variables that contain no information about the individual) can be used to predict an individual-level outcome.
• Grand-mean centering of level 1 variables: Allows level 1 and level 2 variables to control for each other when predicting outcomes.
• Contextual effects provide unique information about how setting level factors may be associated with individual behavior and attitudes.

Setting and Moderation: Cross-Level Interactions

• Ecological theory notes, that context may facilitate of inhibit the development of other individual-level associations, effectively serving to moderate those associations
• Examine contextual characteristics as potential moderators of individual-level associations by investigating cross-level interactions
• Knowledge from such analyses helps inform setting-level interventions to alter environmental conditions and create contexts that protect against individual-level risks.

Latent Variable Approach to Multilevel Modeling

• Regression-based models as well as latent variable analyses can be used for the analytic designs previously described and produce mathematically equivalent solutions.
• The latent variable approach offers additional flexibility in modeling unobserved error in multilevel models.
• Unobserved variability may exist such that meaningful subgroups occur within a more general population.
• Contextual analyses that assume homogeneity across individuals jeopardize context effect estimates that fail to describe any individual.
• Latent Class Analysis (LCA)
  • Investigate the presence of unobserved subgroups of similar individuals within a more general population
  • Can be integrated into multilevel regression, as well as other statistical analyses, to test aggregated effects within more homogeneous subgroups.
  • Level 1: Examines unobserved variability in the outcome associated with individual-level characteristics; iteratively identify the most appropriate number of latent categories within the data
  • Level 2: Tests the effect of aggregated variables within the identified classes, as well as influences on the probability of class membership
  • Allows for person-oriented analyses important to ecological and developmental theories.

Multilevel Growth Curve Modeling: Intra- and Interindividual Change Over Time

• Longitudinal MLM: Investigates intraindividual change (i.e., within-person) across time and interindividual differences (i.e., between-person) simultaneously
  • Separates within- and between-person effects to disentangle the manner in which individuals change over time from differences between individuals
  • Forming the within-person variable by subtracting each person's score at each time point from the individual's average across all measurement occasions to show deviation from their mean at each occasion, whereas the between-person variable is the average across all measurement occasions
  • Examination of intraindividual variation across time provides another way to capture the effects of contexts on behavior and attitudes
• Unconditional growth model: Examines intraindividual change conditioned only on time, allowing for interindividual differences in starting levels (i.e., random intercept) and change (i.e., random slope) in level 1 models.
• Conditional growth models: Regress level 1 outcomes (i.e., intercepts and slopes) on interindividual characteristics specified in level 2 models.
• Growth models may be applied to capture time-varying aspects of settings, such as initial levels and rate of change in social processes, norms, and resources by treating settings as level 1 units.
• Alternatively, two-level models may be extended to examine individual change nested within higher-level units.
• Growth models allow examination of the functional form of change in outcomes over time.
• Curvilinear models build on linear change by sequentially adding polynomial growth terms; models are compared to each other in terms of how well they fit the data and theory to determine the most appropriate shape of change.
• Models may test elaborate theories of change that capture complexities inherent to social behavior.
• Moderation tests examine variability in the relationships between higher-unit predictors and growth over time.
• Moderation tests through the latent variable approach also allow empirical examination of measurement invariance across time and developmental stage.

Testing Change in Context: Contemporaneous, and Lagged Models

• One approach incorporates time-variant covariates in longitudinal MLM
  • Repeated observations of both outcome and setting characteristics are modeled at level 1
  • Regressions may be specified to test different types of effects on change
    • Contemporaneous effects: Regress the outcome on the covariate at the same measurement occasion for each wave, assuming short-term effects associated with fluctuations in levels of risk or protective factors.
    • Lagged effects: Regress the outcome on the covariate at the prior measurement occasion to examine whether contextual characteristics impact future outcomes.
• Time invariant covariates may also be included in models at level 2 to examine prospective and cumulative effects of risk and protective factors, assuming exposure to contexts produce enduring effects or effects only after crossing a threshold

Subgroups of Change: Growth Mixture Modeling

• Latent variable approach provides additional flexibility to investigate whether subgroups share similar pattern of change over time.
• Growth mixture modeling (GMM): Aims to identify the smallest number of latent classes of individuals with similar developmental trajectories
  • Examine heterogeneity in initial start points and growth estimates to determine whether subgroups exist that share common growth trajectories and the extent to which subgroups differ from one another.
  • A latent categorial variable represents subgroups that vary around different means and different functional forms of growth
  • An iterative process estimates models with one additional latent trajectory class, and fit indices compare whether the inclusion of an additional subgroup improves the model fit to the data.
  • A number of considerations guide decisions on the most parsimonious model
  • Statistical tests provide empirical information on the absolute and relative fit of models compared to models specifying additional classes, whereas practical considerations include size of subgroups and meaningfulness of subgroup differences.
  • Ability of testing nonlinear shape of change
  • Allows inclusion of time invariant and variant covariates of growth
  • Level 1 covariate effects may be held constant across subgroups, or alternatively, be allowed to vary between latent classes to examine whether higher-unit characteristics function differently among subgroups
  • Distal outcomes may be incorporated into models to provide parsimonious tests of predictors and consequences of class membership; proves especially useful in the investigation of the validity of subgroups; elaborate theories of how developmental subgroups should function according to covariates and distal outcomes may be empirically tested

Discontinuous Change: Latent Class Analysis and Latent Transition Analysis

• Test discrete change processes that reflect qualitative differences across time
  • Allows investigation of the probability of change in unobserved subgroups over time
  • Differs from GMM that explores unobserved variation in the functional form of growth trajectories
• Repeated measures latent class analysis (RMLCA): Investigates the prevalence of latent subgroups at multiple time points, and observes the probability of individuals shifting subgroups over time
• Latent transition analysis (LTA): Imposes additional restrictions on longitudinal LCA to examine more explicitly the incidence of instability across all measurement occasion.
  • Markov models condition subsequent subgroup membership on prior subgroup membership to identify latent classes of patterns of stability or change

Summary

• Multilevel modeling allows examining complex relations between variables at different levels of analysis. Students should understand the distinction between individual and group levels. An individual-level variable can be aggregated to the group level, yielding an ecological variable that may show different associations than the individual variable. This demonstrates the ecological fallacy.
• Contextual effects models test how group-level variables predict individual outcomes over and above individual predictors. Proper centering of variables allows level 1 and 2 variables to control for each other. Contextual effects show how settings shape individual outcomes.
• Cross-level interactions can test setting variables as moderators of individual-level associations, as per ecological theory. Interventions can create contexts that buffer individual risks.
• Latent class analysis identifies unobserved subgroups within a population that may show differential effects. This can be integrated into multilevel modeling for more valid analysis of contextual influences.
• Growth models analyze individual change over time. Separating within- and between-person effects models intraindividual change and interindividual differences. Curvilinear models test complex change patterns.
• Time-varying covariates test short-term or lagged effects of fluctuating contextual factors. Static covariates test cumulative contextual effects.
• Growth mixture models identify latent subgroups following distinct developmental trajectories over time. Rigorous model selection criteria determine the optimal number of classes.

What are (hierarchical) data "cross-classified"? What would be (for hierarchical data) the opposite of "cross-classified"?

• Cross-classified: Smaller units (e.g., individuals) are in distinct sets of two or more hierarchically higher ordered units (e.g. schools, neighborhoods) which are intersecting.
• Example: Students from the same neighborhood may attend different schools
  • Schools are comprised of students from different neighborhoods
  • E.g., examine how neighborhood and school characteristics shape educational outcomes
  • Allowed researchers to jointly examine the social ecology of one's neighborhood and school to see how each contributes to the educational success of student.
• Perfect hierarchy: Smaller units (e.g., individuals) are in distinct sets of two or more hierarchically higher ordered units (e.g. schools, classes) which are perfectly nested.

What is the big advantage of multilevel analysis in terms of the type (scale level, distribution) of the dependent variables?

• Flexibility of the type of outcome variable that can be modeled
• Outcomes can be binary, multinomial, ordinal, count, rates, or other forms of nonnormally distributed data
• MLM: Within the larger framework of the generalized linear mixed model
  • As long as the researcher specifies a reasonable distribution for the response variable and a link function, almost any type of outcome can be modeled with accurate estimates of parameters and standard errors.
• Longitudinal MLM also handles various types of outcome distributions, such as normal, binomial, and Poisson distributions.
• Able to handle floor effects of very skewed continuous outcomes common to community-based research. Two-part, or semicontinuous, growth models simultaneously examine whether or not an event occurs and estimates patterns of growth when the outcome ensues.
• GMM handles various outcome distributions (e.g., normal, binomial, count and Poisson repeated measures)

How are temporal changes modeled in multilevel analyses?

• Growth: Modeled for each person to account for within-person dependence.
• Growth curves: Represent individual trajectories across measurement occasions with variability in initial levels of the outcome, as well as the shape and rate of change over time.
• Level 1: Repeated observations of the same person, or unit
• Level 2: Person, or unit
• Allows examine questions such as how risks threaten well-being over time in the context of promotive factors, whether settings-level characteristics endure or fluctuate over time, and how fluctuations in outcomes relate to setting-level change.
• Enhances theoretical understanding, as well as informs preventive interventions through programming and policy.
• Test change in repeated measurements that recognizes variability among individuals in starting and ending points.
• Emphasizes ecological and person-oriented frameworks
• Collecting repeated observations of both outcomes and contexts provides opportunities for hypothesis testing through MLM.
• Models handle individually varying times between observations to produce meaningful estimates of covariate effects because time is explicitly included in the model.
• Traditional growth curve models estimate trajectories across repeated measures for every individual and assume normal variation around initial levels and rates of change.
  • Models fit a single growth curve that represents the population with error terms that represent variation around average intercepts and slope terms.
• Latent variable approach allows an empirical investigation into whether meaningful subgroups exist in patterns of growth across time
  • Extensive opportunities for community-based research and action that recognize variability in the experiences of individuals and settings over time and attend to the role culture and diversity

What are the advantages of MLM in the analysis of longitudinal data with missing values?

• Growth curves appropriately handle missing outcome data and unevenness in follow-up periods common in longitudinal studies
• Maximum likelihood estimation generates unbiased parameters capturing change.

What are tests of measurement invariance used for in longitudinal studies?

• Tests of measurement invariance represent an important consideration in understanding whether observed change reflects variation in a construct (e.g., externalizing behavior), or whether the meaning of measurement changes (e.g., hitting in preschool versus high school)
• This application has important implications for culturally sensitive longitudinal measurement of diverse individual settings.

What is meant by "parallel processes growth models" and "piecewise growth models"?

• Parallel processes growth models: Instead of including contextual characteristics as time-varying covariates at specific measurement occasions, they estimate change in multiple cooccurring processes, and then examine the effect of growth in one system on growth in another
  • Useful in consideration of developmental cascades that assume the accumulation of competencies sets the stage for subsequent developmental success
  • Applications as to understand neighborhood changes associated with community development initiatives or preventive interventions targeting developmental cascades
• Piecewise growth models: Investigate whether change-points exist that reflect qualitative alterations in the direction of growth; models appropriately incorporate the context of individual variation in initial and subsequent growth
  • Tests questions regarding discontinuities in the quality of change in outcome over time

What practical problems arise when performing multilevel analyzes?

• Data collection with multiple individuals from multiple groups that represent the population of interest requires significant resources.
• Complexity exists in designing MLM studies and calculating statistical power.
• Many community-based research questions are better addressed through other analytic tools and approaches, such as qualitative methods, systems science applications, and participatory approaches.
• Complexities challenge capacities of individual investigators and training programs.
  • Collaborative community-based partnerships
  • Technical and ethical implications of analysis and design
  • Ongoing training in various methodologies
  • Transdisciplinary approach
  • Adaptive and culturally sensitive designs
  • Understanding of context, change, and changing contexts

Summary

• Consideration of context is core to community psychology. Theories like ecological systems theory explain how settings shape behavior through nested, interacting levels from macro to micro. Contexts also change over time. Multilevel analysis techniques allow empirically testing these ecological models.
• Multilevel modeling analyses data at both individual and group levels. It handles nested data where lower-level units are clustered in higher groups. This dependence violates OLS regression assumptions. MLM separately models within- and between-group variability.
• MLM can examine individual and group effects, contextual influences, cross-level interactions, longitudinal growth, and change over time. It handles various outcome types and missing data. Multiple interconnected contexts can be modeled.
• Complex techniques include latent class analysis to identify subgroups, growth models to analyze individual change, growth mixture modeling to find developmental trajectories, and latent transition analysis to test qualitative change.
• Centering, aggregation, multilevel regression, latent variables, and model fit testing are technical components of MLM. Various effects over time can be specified. Subgroups provide information about variability.
• Key challenges are data needs, statistical power, model complexity, and capacity for multidisciplinary collaboration.

Diary Methods: Capturing Live as it is Lived

What is the diary method?

Definition

Diaries: Self-report instruments used repeatedly to examine ongoing experiences; investigate social, psychological, and physiological processes, within everyday situations and recognize the importance of the contexts in which these processes unfold.

Categorization of Diary Designs

• Time-based designs
  • Interval-contingent designs: Requires participants to report on their experiences at regular, predetermined intervals
  • Signal-contingent designs: Rely on some signaling device to prompt participants to provide diary reports at fixed, random or a combination of fixed and random intervals
• Event-contingent designs: Require participants to provide a self-report each time the event in question occurs; Enables the assessment of rare or specialized occurrences that would not necessarily be captured by fixed or random interval assessments

Time-based Designs

General Considerations

• Used to investigate within-person processes or aggregated levels of variables
• Often concerned with ongoing experiences that can be assessed within the course of a typical period (fixed schedule) or with momentary experiences such as psychological states (variable schedule)
• The selection of schedules and intervals should be theoretically and/or empirically guided.

Fixed Schedule

• Schedules that include either specific times of the day or specific time intervals.
• Spacing of intervals
  • Too long an interval may obscure natural cycles or exclude important intervening events and processes
  • Lengthy intervals may also contribute to the risk of biased retrospection
    • More distant events are less likely to be recalled accurately; they are also more likely to be influenced by retrospection and by current psychological states
    • Concrete, objective events may be less susceptible to recall bias than are transient subjective feelings such as pain or mood
  • Too short intervals could lead to unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio.
    • Researchers may miss slower-acting processes if data are collected and analyzed at intervals that are much shorter than what is needed to capture the change process
  • Short intervals also place considerable burden on the participants by frequent reporting
• When diary researchers elect to use fixed-interval response schedules, they need to decide at the outset what interval is most appropriate
  • What time lag is acceptable between the experience and the description, and what time frame is likely to reveal dynamic processes that are of interest?
  • Generally, it is better to err on side of shorter intervals, because the data can then be analyzed with lags of different lengths.

Variable Schedule

• Assessment of experiences according to a random pattern that is undisclosed to the participants
• Have the ability to randomly sample moments in a participant's day
• Participant burden lies in diaries to become intrusive, when participants are required to complete entries immediately following randomly timed signals.
• Researchers may allow participants to postpone responding in inopportune moments.
  • Allowing delays in the completion of an entry may introduce bias, whereby participants select the times on which they want to report

Event-based Designs

• Require participants to provide reports at every instance that meets the researcher's preestablished definition
• Most appropriate for diary studies of specific classes of phenomena or processes, especially those that are isolated and/or rare.
• Requires a clear definition of the triggering event(s).
  • Any ambiguity as to which events fall within that definition may lead participants to omit relevant exemplars.
  • Reduce ambiguity in considering identifying a single class of events as focal.
  • Examining multiple classes of events greatly increases the possibility of confusion as to whether a given event should be reported, as well as the risk of participant burden
  • Both risks may lead to a decrease in the number of episodes reported and a weakening of the study's usefulness
• Risks
  • Participants may not reliably identify each relevant event
  • Overgeneralizing form the event-based responses to the person's general experience
    • Even when all relevant events are comprehensively reported.

For which research questions is the diary method particularly suitable?

Overview

• Obtaining reliable person-level information
• Obtaining estimates of within-person change over time, as well as individual differences in such change
• Conducting a causal analysis of within-person changes and individual differences in these changes
• Investigation of phenomena as they unfold over time
• Focused examination of specific, and often rare, phenomena

Aggregating Over Time: What is the Typical Person Like, and how Much do People Differ From Each Other?

• Common in psychological research: Ask participants to retrospect over weeks and months and provide summary accounts of their psychological states and experiences
• Diary data can be used to generate summary accounts without the biases introduced by retrospection over relatively long periods.
• The can be used to estimate within-person central tendency as well as how much people vary over time in variables of interest.
• Even when diaries are used solely to obtain aggregate measures, researchers must determine the frequency and duration of assessments that are appropriate for the phenomenon under study.
• A traditional alternative to aggregate diary data has been the use of single reports in which participants attempt to recall their experiences
  • Often plagued by biases
  • Participants have limited ability to recall; results in retrospective "aggregate" responses that reflect faulty reconstruction of the phenomenon
  • Retrospection is susceptible to state-congruent recall: The current state cues similar or similarly valenced instances, leading to biased report
• Respondents tend to reply on a "peak-end" rule, giving more weight to the peak level and to the most recent levels of experience rather than equally weighting each instance or day.
• Subjective aggregates have a poorer fit to actual experiences, than do empirical aggregates based on these responses.

Modeling the Time Course: How Does a Typical Person Change Over Time, and how do People Differ in Change Over Time?

• Diary designs are excellent for studying temporal dynamics, having participants report their experiences over hours, days, weeks, and sometimes months.
• Traditional longitudinal designs: Address these questions, but because they typically involve only a small number of repeated measurements taken at long intervals, they cannot capture changes with the same fidelity.
• Diary data have been used to examine circadian or diurnal rhythms, weekly cycles, as well as longer time-units, and seasons
  • The cyclical nature of such data can be modeled using sine/cosine curves; procedures such as spectral analysis are used to obtain the various parameters of these curves (length, amplitude, phase, and fit to the data)
• Within-person variability can be modeled with various predictors beside time

Modeling Within-Person Processes: What is the Within-Person Process for the Typical Person, and how do People Differ in These Processes?

• Diary designs to investigate processes that underlie within-person variability. They can help determine the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of daily experiences and can also be used to evaluate whether individuals differ in these processes, and if so, determine the sources of these individual differences
• The researcher must decide on the rate and timing of self-reports.
  • If these are high-frequency events, he or she may wish to ask participants to report only on some instances or on a certain number of instances each day
  • Allowing this choice runs the risk of introducing each participant's bias in selecting some instances and overlooking others.
    • Can be minimized with appropriate subject training.
• The researcher must choose whether to have participants report on the relevant events immediately after their occurrence or to allow participants to postpone responding at inopportune moments
  • The latter concession may work against the recall accuracy, or reliability, of the reports.
  • The researcher may request completion of entries at the conclusion of appropriate events, with the stipulation that they may be postponed under specific circumstances
• Few diary studies have capitalized on major events and transitions to study psychological change and to model the processes underlying it.
  • They target periods when people and their environments are in flux, and they yield fine-grained data on mediating variables during such periods.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using the diary method?

Advantages

• Diary methods permit the examination of reported events and experiences in their natural, spontaneous context, providing information complementary to that obtainable by more traditional designs.
• They dramatically reduce the likelihood of retrospection, achieved by minimizing the amount of time elapsed between an experience and the account of this experience.
• Phenomena: Personality processes, marital and family interaction, physical symptoms, and mental health.
• Reduction in systematic and random sources of measurement error, and with it the increase in validity and reliability.
• Ability to characterize temporal dynamics, such as diurnal cycles, weekday versus weekend effects, seasonal variation, or the effect of time to, or since, an event
• Diary designs are superior to traditional designs in examining processes because they allow investigators to examine temporal sequencing of events and to control for third variables by using participants as their own controls.

Disadvantages

• Diary studies often require detailed training sessions to ensure that participants fully understand the protocol
• Diary studies must achieve a level of participant commitment and dedication
  • Burden of repeated queries and responses
  • Investigators usually design diary instruments that are short and take several minutes to complete.
    • This can limit diary studies to less in-depth reporting of a phenomenon at each time of measurement
• Reactance: Change in participants' experience of behavior as a result of participation in the study
• Habituation, and more specifically the development of habitual response style when making diary entries may have some deleterious effects
• With repeated exposure to a diary questionnaire, participants' understanding of a particular construct may change
  • A more complex understanding of the surveyed domain may develop, as may enhanced encoding of retrieval of domain-relevant information
• While participants may not develop a more elaborate or complex knowledge of the monitored domain, the experience of the diary study may entrain their conceptualization of the domain to fit with those measured in the diary
• There were documented therapeutic outcomes to a certain kind of self-reflective recollection process
  • They have not been found in simple quantitative ratings such as are typical in most diary studies
• Little is known about personality or symptom effects on response compliance style
  • Individual differences in various dimensions may lead to selective biases in the ability to respond to diary questionnaires
• Diary studies of within-person processes are mostly nonexperimental, allowing putative causes and consequences to occur naturally
  • At best allow weak inferences about cause and effect

How can paper diaries be supplemented with technical aids?

Paper and Pencil Diaries

• Familiar to participants, easiest technology for participants to use
• Pretesting: Instruction on how to complete and return diaries; in some studies, they complete the first diary entry in the laboratory
• Limitations
  • Risk of honest forgetfulness, where participants fail to remember the scheduled response time or fail to have the diaries at hand
  • Risk of retrospection error, where participants rely on (benign) reconstruction or (deliberate) fabrication to complete missed entries
  • Uncertain compliance in numbers of entries and their validity
    • Debriefing interviews to obtain self-reported compliance indices; mixed results
    • Verification information, e.g., to ask participants to report time of response, while simultaneously obtaining collateral information from a separate computerized task, thus identifying those who are prone inaccuracy
    • Neither of these techniques fully guarantees compliance
  • Absence of response-time information
  • Human error in response or in entry stages
  • Burden of data entry and handling
    • Even in relatively small diary studies, the data records number in the thousands
    • Minimize data entry errors by double-enter
  • Risk that prior days' responses may be viewed by others, participants may hesitate to be completely truthful in their responses about interpersonal events and emotions
    • Ask participants to seal the pages of completed diaries
• Suggestions
  • Easily portable as pocket-sized booklets, stapled or bound, allowing participants to carry them around in one piece
  • Reduce participant error: Preprint the dates and times of expected responses (fixed schedule) onto the diary sheets in order to keep participants on track
  • Reduce demand characteristics by clarifying the importance of accurate over numerous responses
  • Ask participants to note whether the entry was completed "on time"
  • Pilot test the diary on participants from the population of interest
  • Maintain ongoing contact with participants, in a personal yet nonintrusive manner

Augmented Paper Diaries

• Experience-sampling method (ESM)
• Ecological momentary assessment method (EMA)
• Augmentation with signaling devices, such as pagers, preprogrammed wristwatches, or phone calls
  • Offer a remedy to honest forgetfulness and some relief for retrospection and uncertain compliance
  • Rather than relying on participant's timeliness or individually devised methods of self-remainder, ancillary devices can be preprogrammed to signal randomly or at fixed intervals, prompting research participants' responses and relieving them of the need to keep track of appropriate occasions for response
• Are of limited utility for event-based studies
  • It may be possible to randomly signal participants and obtain sufficient responses for some high-frequency prolonged events
  • Time-based signals are likely to miss many discrete events, even those that occur numerous times each day
• Signaling device eliminates the burden of remembering to complete diary entries, but some of simpler P & P designs (retrospection error, uncertain compliance, cumbersome data entry and data management) remain
• Setup is more involved and costly. Signaling devices need to be purchased, programmed, and maintained, and participants need to be trained in their usage
• Signaling magnifies the problem of disruptiveness. Potential participants may anticipate this and decline participation or adopt behaviors that defeat the purpose of the studies
  • Researches need to be aware of their participants' schedules and must choose and program the signals in a way that is minimally disruptive of the participants' routines
  • Tailor the signaling schedule individually for each participant

What should be considered in the data analysis?

Overview

• The data involve repeated measurements, and thus the within-person data points cannot be assumed to be independent.
• The dependence of the observations is often serial, in that diary reports adjacent in time are more similar than those more distant in time
• The number of diary reports is often large and varies from person to person, making usual repeated-measures analyses infeasible
• Temporal patterns and cycles are often present in the data, and thus flexible classes of mathematical models need to be considered
• Multilevel models modified to handle repeated-measures data, are appropriate for diary data analysis

Aggregating Over Time: What is the Typical Person Like, and How Much Do People Differ from Each Other?

The Typical Preson's Average and Variability

• Calculate the average level and variability for average person
• Canonical Approach: Simply calculate a mean and a standard deviation separately for each participant and obtain arithmetic averages of these to estimate the mean and standard deviation for the typical participant
  • Will suffice if each participant provides many repeated measurements
• Multilevel analysis: Specify a statistical model with two levels: Level 1 a within-person level, and level 2, a between-person level.
  • The within-person level specifies that each individual score is composed of the average plus that score's deviation from the average
  • The between-person level specifies that an individual mean score is composed of the overall mean scores across all persons and that particular individual's deviation from the overall men
  • One-Way ANOVA with Random Effects: One can obtain a summary measure of variability for the typical person: the level-1 error variance

Assumptions About Within-Person Variation

• Data are ordered in time and this ordering may be relevant for one's analyses
• When in diary data the nesting involves persons within groups, the ordering is often inconsequential
• When adjacent data have stronger dependence on one another than nonadjacent data, a pattern of autocorrelation will be observed
• Because the correlation between adjacent data points is typically positive, autocorrelation generally leads to estimates of within-person variability that are smaller than they would be if the reports were independent of one another. This produces a downward bias in standard errors and overly liberal tests of significance.
• Multilevel software allows modeling autocorrelation in within-person error terms and correct for this biasing influence.
• Autocorrelated errors in simple models may disappear when these models are expanded to include omitted variables.

Between-Person Differences in Aggregated Data

• The extent to which there are between-person differences in a level-1- variable must be determined in models of between-person differences
• With actual diary data there is often a large degree of overlap in individuals' distributions, and appropriate statistical tests are needed to determine if these distributions differ from one another
  • Distributions of sample means from diary data will show more variability than would true means because the observed mean of an individual will be an imperfect estimate of it's true mean due to sampling error
  • The uncertainty in the estimate of between-person variability is greatest when within-person sample sizes are small
• One-Way ANOVA with Random Effects: Will produce unbiased estimates of the between-person variability
• All multilevel modeling software can handle such models and provide
  • A significance test of whether the data show between-person variability in means
  • An estimate of the size of the variability (variance of standard deviations)
  • Tests of individual differences in the within-person variability, which are a feature of the example data

Explaining Between-Person Differences

• The notion of a "typical person" is less useful in describing the data and suggests the need to investigate sources of between-person variability
• In nonexperimental diary studies these can involve relatively stable characteristics of participants or of their environment.
• In experimental work, one may be interested in comparing the levels of the outcome in an experimental group and in a control group
• Means-as-outcome-model: Level 1 (within-person level) specifies each individuals score on a given time point as the sum over its average across all time points plus that time point's deviation from that average. Level 2 (between-person level) specifies that each individual's average score is the sum of the mean score of all individuals in a given group plus it's deviation from that group mean.
• A test of autocorrelation is advisable, and if present, the autocorrelation should be modeled, thereby obtaining unbiased estimates of within-person variances

Modeling Within-Person Processes: What is the Within-Person Process for the Typical Person, and How Do People Differ in These Processes?

The Typical Person's Time Course

• Linear Growth Model
  • Level 1 specifies the within-person level. An individual's score on a given time point is the sum of the starting level, the rate of change per time unit, multiplied by the surpassed time interval, and a residual term, the actual score's deviation from the predicted value for the respective time point
  • Level 2 specifies the between-person level. An individual's starting value (or rate of change) is the sum of the mean starting point (or mean rate of change) plus it's deviations from those averages.
  • The starting value, rate of change, and residual for the typical person can be obtained.

Between-Person Differences in Change

• Linear Growth Model: Will provide estimates (and tests of significance) of between-person variability of the starting values and rates of change.
• The observed variability in starting values and rates of change, if these were obtained from separate regression analyses instead of multilevel model, would be biased upwards. In case of slopes based on small numbers of observations, this bias can be severe.
• Allowing for individual differences in growth can eliminate autocorrelation in within-subject errors.

Explaining Between-Person Differences in Change

• Modified Linear Growth Model
  • Level 1 specifies the within-person level. An individual's score on a given time point is the sum of the starting level, the rate of change per time unit, multiplied by the surpassed time interval, and a residual term, the actual score's deviation from the predicted value for the respective time point
  • Level 2 (between-person level). Provides estimates of a mean intercept and a mean slope for each condition. Within each condition, individuals are allowed to show deviations from the average for their condition

Modeling Within-Person Processes: What is the Within-Person Process for the Typical Person, and How Do People Differ in These Processes?

Overview

• Developing an explanatory model of the factors affecting within-person variability in the data.
  • May evolve from an initial model of the time course in the dependent variable or from an interest in explanatory variables that are not necessarily related to elapsed time in the study
• It is always wise to include process models parameters for elapsed time in the study and for cyclical effects such as time of day or day of week.
• Some factors of interest may show considerable temporal variability, such as weekday versus weekend differences, and any attempt to estimate support effects should hold constant day of the week, as it is a plausible third variable in the relationship between support and distress.

Within-Person Process Model for the Average Person and Between-Person Differences in Process

• Models that characterize both the average person and between-person differences
• Main issue: Whether, and if so, how, to use the longitudinal nature of the diary design to study lagged effects as a means of addressing the possibility of bidirectional processes
• With diary design the lagged analysis is within - rather than between - subjects and is therefore less vulnerable to rival hypotheses
• Approach: Create new variables - one-day lagged versions independent and dependent variables - and examine whether, controlling for lagged dependent variables, lagged independent variable predicts the current value of the dependent variable.
• One could begin an analysis by estimate separate level-1 regressions for each individual, where the main coefficient of interest would be one for lagged predictor. These coefficients could then be averaged to arrive at a between person average.
  • The variability in these coefficients would be inflated due to sampling error, but the average coefficient would give an unbiased estimate of the population value.
• More appropriate: Random-Coefficients Regression Model
  • Provides appropriate estimates and tests of the average of the level-1 slopes for the predictor, and of the variance of these slopes.
  • Would show evidence of an average effect of the predictor but would also show evidence of between-person differences in this effect.
  • It would likely not show any between-person differences in level-1 residuals. Once the effect of the predictor is taken into account, the remaining variability does not differ across persons.
• Contemporaneous (cross-sectional) relations
  • Replace contemporaneous predictor with lagged predictor and lagged criterion, the longitudinal analysis can be performed as discussed above
  • Level 1 of the model specifies that a given individual's criterion score on a given time point is the sum of its average criterion score on time points when dichotomous predictor is not present, the additional decrement in the criterion associated with predictor present, and a residual core, its actual criterion score's deviation from its predicted value for that time point.
  • Level 2 specifies each individual's level-1 coefficient is the sum of that coefficient for the average individual, plus it's deviation from that average.
  • This model can be used to produce the estimates and tests described earlier: The coefficients for the average individual, between-person differences in these coefficients, and between-person differences in level-1 errors.

Explaining Between-Person Differences in Within-Person Processes

• Intercepts-and-Slopes-as-Outcomes Model:
  • Level 1 same as in Random-Coefficients Regression Model
  • Level 2 specifies that between-person differences in intercepts and slopes are a function of the explaining factor.

Other Data Analysis Issues

Measurement Models for Within-Person Data

• Specify the factors that affect within-person variability, how people differ from themselves
• Most validation studies of psychological measures involve between-subject designs, and there is no guarantee that these measures are reliable and valid for assessing within-person variability
• Diary researchers who adapt well-validated between-subject measures should consider whether the items they propose using have a similar factor structure within subjects similar to that known to obtain between subjects
• Within-person measurement models differ across people
• Dynamic factor analysis models have not yet been incorporated into popular multilevel modeling software
• Researchers should at least confirm the adequacy of measures using within-subject data that are pooled after centering around each subject's mean.
  • This approach will demonstrate that measurement models are sound at the level of the average person for data collected over time.
  • Researchers need to fit a factor model to the pooled within-person data set.

Data Analysis of Diary Data on Dyads, Families, and Other Groups

• Because social interactions are likely to be important determinants of how people change, and because of the importance of close relationships to such interactions, some diary researchers have attempted to study change processes by collecting diary data on dyads, families, and other important social groups
• Multilevel models can be used effectively for this purpose. Dyadic and group-based diary data can be analyzed in two main ways.
  • Treat the person within the larger group as the main focus and take account of nonindependence between persons due to their common group membership
    • Married couples, e.g.: Separate estimates of within-person parameters for husbands and wives while adjusting for possible correlation in the residual of the model attributable to the couple level of analysis.
      • Modification that incorporates additional sources of nonindependence - one due to omitted transient couple-level influences, and the other due to mitted transient person-level influences.
  • Explicitly decompose the relation between diary measures X and Y into components that reflect covariation operating at the between-group level, between-person within-group level, and within-person level.
    • Work on separating individual and group effects
    • Work on decomposing correlations on data from dyads into dyadic and individual components

Photovoice: Concept, Methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment

What are the three goals that the authors distinguish?

• Enable people to record and reflect their community's strengths and concerns
• Promote critical dialogue and knowledge about important community issues through large and small group discussion of photographs
• Reach policymakers

For which (psychological) questions can Photovoice be used?

• People can identify, represent, and enhance their community
• People can act as recorders, and potential catalysts for change
• It furnishes evidence and promotes an effective, participatory means of sharing expertise and knowledge
• It can be used as a tool for participatory research

On which theoretical and conceptual considerations is Photovoice based?

Three Main Sources of Photovoice

• The theoretical literature on education for critical consciousness, feminist theory, and documentary photography
• The efforts of community photographers and participatory educators to challenge assumptions about representation and documentary authorship
• Experiences articulating and applying the process in the Ford Foundation supported Yunnan Women's Reproductive Health and Development Program

Theoretical Underpinnings

• Adaptation for health education (Wallerstein & Bernstein), based on Freire's methods
  • Problem-posing education starts with issues that people see as central to their lives and then enables them to identify common themes trough dialouge
  • One means of enabling people to think critically about their community, and to begin discussing the everyday social and political forces that influence their lives, was the visual image
  • Freire used line drawings or photographs that represented significant realities or "coded situation-problems".
  • Photovoice: Images of the community are made by the people themselves
• Feminist theory and practice has shed light on the male bias that has influenced participatory research
  • Participatory research may unwittingly contradict itself by making women invisible
  • "Consider the drawings used by Freire for cultural discussions. The drawings, used as the basis for group dialogue about 'man in the world', without doubt, suggest that men, not women, create culture. These drawings encourage men and women to focus on men's contribution to culture. Freire maintained that domination was the major theme of our epoch, yet his conscientizacion tool ignore men's domination of women" (Maguire).
  • Because virtually anyone can learn to use a camera, photovoice may be particularly powerful not only for women but also for workers, children, peasants, people who do not read or write in the dominant language, and people with socially stigmatized health conditions or status.
  • It recognizes that such people often have an expertise and insight into their own communities and worlds that professionals and outsiders lack

Differences to Documentary Photography

• Documentary photography have informed the photovoice approach
• Photovoice gives cameras to people who might otherwise not have access to such a tool, so that they may record and catalyze change in their communities, rather than stand as passive subjects of other people's intentions and images
• Documentary photography is a term for an immense array of visual styles, genres, and commitments
  • It has been characterized as the social conscience presented in visual imagery
• Mekaron Opoi Doi project with the Kayapo Indians of Brazil
  • Had as its goal enabling the Kayapo to produce their own videos according to their interests and needs
  • Kuttab has used videocameras and community-based production techniques to enable Palestinians living in the occupied territories to portray their lives as outsiders
  • Spence explicitly attempted to encourage peasants and workers to "open up for discussion the social, political, institutional, and subjective spaces which we occupy daily"
  • Young has promoted citizen participation by having junior high school students photograph the basic structure of their local school system and discuss how they would go about influencing leaders and making change they believed in.

What are the advantages of Photovoice?

Photovoice in Needs Assessment

• Needs assessment: Community inventory, community assessment, context evaluation, diagnostic evaluation, formative or process evaluation, social diagnosis
  • Citing the advantages of time-honored assessment tools such as focus groups, nominal group process, Delphi technique, surveys, archival research, and interviews
• Photovoice offers several distinctive contributions to needs assessment
  • Enables health researchers and practitioners to gain "the possibility of perceiving the world from the viewpoint of the people who lead lives that are different from those traditionally in control of the means for imaging the world"
    • Values the knowledge put forth by people as a vital source of expertise
    • Confronts a fundamental problem of needs assessment: What researchers think is important may neglect what the community thinks is important
    • The participatory process assumes the legitimacy of popular knowledge produced outside a formal scientific structure
  • Photovoice addresses the descriptive mandate of needs assessment through an exceptionally powerful means: the visual image
  • The process of photovoice can affirm the ingenuity and perspective of society's most vulnerable populations.
    • Photovoice is accessible to anyone who can learn to handle an instamatic camera
    • It does not presume the ability to read and write
  • Photovoice facilitates the sampling of different social and behavioral settings
    • People with cameras can record settings, moments, and ideas, that may not be available to professionals and researchers
  • Photovoice can sustain community participation during the period between the needs assessment phase and program implementation.
    • Cameras are an unusually motivating and appealing tool for most people
    • Using them can be a source of community pride and ownership
  • Photovoice provides a way to reaffirm or redefine program goals during the period when community needs are being assessed
  • Photovoice enables participants to bring the explanations, ideas, or stories of other community members into the assessment process
  • Photovoice provides tangible and immediate benefits to people and their networks
    • Giving photographs back to neighbors and friends enables participants to express their appreciation, build ties, and pass along something of value made by themselves
  • Photovoice enables people to depict not only the community's needs but also its assets.
    • By contrast: Household surveys and other conventional needs assessment methods may inadvertently reinforce a sense of impotence, inferiority, and resentment
  • Embedded in a Freirian context of problem-posing education, the images produced and the issues discussed and framed by people may stimulate social action.
    • Photovoice and be a tool to reach, inform, and organize community members, enabling them to prioritize their concerns and discuss problems and solutions
    • Photovoice invites people to become advocates for their own and their community's well-being

Adaptability

• Photovoice can be used
  • For specific participatory objectives in health promotion
  • With different groups and communities
  • For diverse public health issues
• Photovoice can be used for needs assessment, but can also be adapted for participatory evaluation.
• The breadth and depth of public health problems suggest that photovoice may be a creative approach that enables people to identify, define, and enhance their community according to their own specific concerns and priorities

What challenges or disadvantages of Photovoice do the authors discuss?

• Politics: Competition between competing interest groups or individuals for power.
• Persons who document community reality and discuss community change are committing political acts.
  • If the intent "to do no harm" is paramount, there is the danger that the process of community organization itself may serve more to maintain the status quo than to change it.
• Personal judgment may intervene at many different levels of representation:
  • Who used the camera, what the user photographed, what the user chose not to photograph, who selected which photograph to discuss, and who recorded whose and what thoughts about whose and which photographs
  • Postmodern scrutiny in survey research: Who designed a questionnaire, what questions were put in and what questions where left out, who implemented the questionnaire, who analyzed what components of the data, and who reported what components of the data
  • It's always hard to discover what has been left out
• Broader class stratification may be reproduced by the control of resources.
  • The process entrusts cameras to the hands of ordinary people, but in whose hands does money, support, and editorial control remain?
  • The participatory process attempts to address material and status inequalities, yet the extent to which it may perpetuate those inequalities deserves scrutiny
• Photovoice as a tool to assess community assets and needs raise additional dilemmas
  • Photographs are easy to gather but difficult to analyze and summarize because they yield an abundance of complex data that can be difficult to digest
• Limitations of capital, transportation, and communication raise unique concerns
  • Large-scale applications of photovoice require cooperation between different levels of government
  • The process of a community-based photovoice project can increase communication and build networks among organizations that might otherwise seldom interact, even though the social and economic problems they strive to solve overlap
• Methodological ideals may not coincide with reality
  • Needs assessments always takes place within a social and political context
  • Some cadres had expressed concern about whether photovoice was a foreign intelligence project
  • The use of tapes would have introduced a degree of excruciating self-consciousness for many village women, who also believed it was strange, if not suspicious, for anyone to think they hat anything valuable to say

What role do those affected play in describing their needs and what implications does this have? What role do journalists, policymakers, activists or social movements play in this?

• Local coresearchers are best able to define and articulate their own needes and they ought to be the most important actors in designing efforts to address those needs
• Mediating structures that connect individuals and the larger social environment are powerful and serve as points of access to, and influence on, the larger social environment.
  • Such structures may include activists, policymakers, journalists, and elected officials and may take the form of a steering committee, board of directors, or advisory group
  • Members of such structures might be recruited form the leadership of virtually every sector of society that influences coresearchers' lives
  • Throughout needs assessment, the structure might provide a formal forum for feedback, such as through slied shows in which people show to policymakers what mattered in their daily lives and what needed to change.

What attitudes and skills should moderators (facilitators) have who implement Photovoice?

• Facilitation: Commitment to improve the ability of group members to work together effectively, to provide an information resource, and to reduce dependence on the facilitator for solving future problems.
  • A core training team may include both outsider and insider facilitators
• Facilitator
  • Has usually a ring of neutrality, but in photovoice, the facilitator is accountable to a group or community and openly committed to certain kinds of social change
  • Must recognize the political nature of photography and community-based work
  • Should be sensitive to issues of power and ethics related to cameras
  • Should recognize personal aesthetic tastes and biases in photography
  • Should be supportive of different styles of picture-taking
• Being an effective facilitator turns on one's understanding of photovoice as a Freirian process of discussion and action and on the ability to facilitate dialogue about the social and political context of visual images
• Facilitator's commitments require an understanding of local history, economics, and culture.
  • This understanding takes on greater importance when outsiders participate as facilitators and trainers, for they enter "not as persons who have answers but as learners"
  • The starting point should be humility, honesty, and openness in their participation and a recognition of the failure of solutions that do not consider the cultural patterns and social relations of people and that exclude people from the decision-making process
• Purposes of preparing coresearchers as trainers
  • Enrich collaboration between community organizations and the people they serve
  • Improve existing organizations' infrastructure, effectiveness, and credibility in the community
  • Improve skills and resources of grassroots workers dedicated to social change

How should Photovoice trainings be implemented? What attitude / understanding should underlie a Photovoice training? What content should be addressed?

• Trainings are tailored to a communitiy's specific goals, culture, and priorities, but several conceptual guidelines apply
• Challenge is to offer guidelines that might expand, rather than limit, the perceived range of community's assets and to avoid a language that pathagolizes its members
  • Training in Yunnan: Asked women simply to photograph the spirit of village women's everyday lives
  • Spirit might carry an implicit compliment, evoking the strength women need to do their everyday work
  • Researchers wanted to expand the women's ideas about picture taking but to stay close to what they felt deeply
• First training should include
  • Discussion of cameras, ethics, and power; ways of seeing photographs; and a philosophy of giving photographs back to community members as a way of expressing appreciation, respect, or camaraderie
    • What is an acceptable way to approach someone to take their picture?
    • Should someone take pictures of other people without their knowledge?
    • What criteria should we use when evaluating photographs?
    • To whom might people wish to give photographs, and what might be the implication
  • Move to address mechanical aspects of camera use
    • How to protect them; parts of the camera; operating the camera; when to use the flash; indoor, outdoor, and night use; camera handling when taking photos; distance from subject; and framing
    • Loading the camera; taking photos in the village; close-ups and angles; different ways to photograph a family or a group of people; posed and unposed pictures; and how symbols of the community or culture might be photographed
  • Facilitators should minimize technical advice to avoid stifling people's creativity
• Second training
  • Exchange about experiences what it was like to take photographs for the first time
• Third day
  • Full set of all pictures, which provided a catalyst for more group discussions

What should be considered when "evaluating" the photos created as part of Photovoice?

• Purpose of group discussion: Enable people to reflect on the images they have produced
  • Transferring the photographs to slide form makes group discussion easier and literally enlarges the visual impact of the images
  • People also might wish to study internationally known historic images that illustrate how photography has been used to promote social change
  • But the more important part is to discuss the own work as slides and discuss it
  • Facilitators and coresearchers should set a supportive tone for discussion
  • Facilitators acknowledged that the women in Yunnan might prefer talking individually among themselves rather than in group settings, that they might be reluctant to bring up problems for fear or being seen as challenging their leaders and as complaining of neglect, and that they felt a responsibility to one another that induced respect
• Using Photovoice as a tool for participatory needs assessment involves people in defining issues
  • This avoids the distortion of fitting data into a predetermind paradigm
  • It enable us to hear and understand how people make meaning themselves or construct what matters to them
  • Photovoice is not simply the shuffling of information around but entails people reflecting on their own community portraits and voices and on what questions can be linked into more general constructs or can be seen to be interrelated

Outline the steps that are taken when Photovoice is used as a needs assessment tool

• In using photovoice for needs assessment, participants should be involved in a three-stage process that provides the foundation for analysis
  • Selecting (choosing those photographs that most accurately reflect the community's needs and assests)
    • People choose the photographs by themselves to lead the discussion
  • Contextualizing (telling stories about what the photographs mean)
    • Occurs in the process of group discussion, suggested by the acronym VOICE (voicing our individual and collective experience)
    • Photographs alone, considered outside the context of coresearchers own voice and stories, would contradict the essence of photovoice
    • Coresearchers could write captions for the pictures or tell their stories to family members and friends
  • Codifying (identifying those issues, themes, or theories that emerge)
    • The participatory approach gives multiple meanings to singular images and thus frames
    • Participants may identify three types of dimensions that arise from the dialogue process
      • Issues: When the concern targeted for action are pragmatic, immediate, and tangible
      • Themes and patterns, or theories, that hare grounded in data that have been systematically gathered and analyzed in collective discussion

What similarities (or differences) exist between Photovoice and other instruments of needs analysis (e.g. written surveys, focus groups)?

• Photovoice did not differ notably from the other needs assessment techniques in what it uncovered
• The difference was in the process that was used and the implications of that process
• From four assessment techniques, the public health needs and issues that were identified in a study in Yunnan spanned burdens and status of women and girls relative to men and boys, access to clean water and transportation, and maternal and child health
• An assessment may operate no less efficiently on comparatively coarse measurements
• Photovoice is a participatory method not of counting up things but of drawing on the community's active lore, observation, and stories, in terms both visual and oral.

What is meant by internal and external replication?

• There are dilemmas suggested by issues of representation as well as in how to prioritize findings
• Replication might be an analytical strategy to address these dilemmas
• Internal replication: Findings may be validated by other remarks from a single source.
• External replication: Findings may be validated by other sources.
• No claim is made that the data that emerge from the process are representative in a social scientific way
• But taken together, there may be enough internal and external replication to suggest that the findings provide a reliable picture of people's priorities at a particular historical moment.

Implementing Intervention Research into Public - the "I³-Approach"

Line out the parallel development of evidence-based development of interventions and implementation research. What is the focus of both?

• Recent decades: Evidence-based movement; make better use of research-based prevention and intervention programs
  • Standards of evidence: Which interventions are efficatcious, which are effective, and which are ready for dissemination
  • Evidence-based programs are defined by the research methodology used to evaluate them, and randomized trials are defined as the gold standard for defining evidence
  • There has not been extensive implementation of the body of evidence-based research, and the adoption of prevention and intervention programs is driven more by ideology than by evidence.
• Recent years: Implementation research has emerged
  • A growing body of implementation research has indicated that an active, long-term, multilevel implementation approach (= mission-driven focus) is far more effective than passive forms of dissemination without any active involvement of practitioners
• Implementation: Specific set of activities designed to put into practice an activity or a program of known dimensions.
• Implementation research: The scientific study of methods to promote the systematic uptake of research findings and evidence-based practices into professional practice and public policy.
  • Remains rather isolated and is sometimes considered to be less scientifically valuable than research that develops new interventions
  • Is very difficult to do within the constraints of university research environments
• Intervention research and implementation research have not yet been systematically connected
  • Intervention activity: Provision of a prevention or intervention program to clients; consists of a group leader conducting the program with target people
  • Implementation activity: Actions taken in the organizational setting to ensure that the intervention delivered to clients is complete and appropriate
• Meyers et al. (2012): Overview about implementation frameworks
  • 25 frameworks, 14 dimensions
  • Six areas: Assessment strategies, decisions about adaptation, capacity-building strategies, creating a structure for implementation, ongoing implementation support strategies, improving future applications
  • Synthesis: Implementation process consists of a temporal series of these interrelated steps, which are critical to quality implementation
  • Although there is a large body of empirical evidence on the importance of implementation and growing knowledge of the contextual factors that can influence implementation, knowledge of how to increase the likelihood of quality implementation is still needed.

What is the main reason for failed implementation of programs according to Spiel et al.?

• Implementation researchers are mostly given mandates by politicians to take on the implementation of already existing interventions.
• Implementing evidence-based programs into practice and in the wider range of public policy has often failed
• One of the central reasons for this disappointment is: Program evaluation has not historically included any mention of systematic study of implementation

What characterizes the I³ framework? In what way should intervention and implementation research be better integrated with the framework?

• Researchers should design and develop intervention programs based on a field-oriented and participative approach from the very beginning
  • The whole conceptualization of an intervention as well as its evaluation and implementation should systematically consider the needs of the field, and intervention, evaluation, and implementation should be developed in an integrated way
  • It should be included
    • The perspective of all stakeholders
    • Especially the perspectives of policymakers
    • The analyses of what factors support or hinder evidence-based policy

Name the central components of the six stages of the PASCIT process

Overview

1. Mission-driven Problem recognition (P)
2. Ensuring Availability of robust knowledge on how to handle the problem (A)
3. Identification of reasonable Starting points for action (S)
4. Establishment of a Cooperation process with policymakers (C)
5. Coordinated development of Intervention and Implementation (I)
6. Transfer of program implementation (T)

• These steps have to be seen as one coherent and integrated approach to intervention and implementation research and as parts of a dynamic process with many sub-processes, feedback loops, and interdependencies
• The sound, consistent integration of intervention and implementation research with the goal of introducing changes to policy also requires a (re) differentiation of our scientific identity and the creation of a new, wider job description for researchers in this field

Step 1: Mission-driven Problem recognition (P)

• In case of intervention/prevention and implementation, the focus is not primarily on basic research but on (mostly social) problems in society
• Researchers must be curiosity-driven but also mission-driven, combining the quest for fundamental understanding with a consideration of practical use
• The first step requires socio-political responsibility as a basic mindset

Step 2: Ensuring Availability of robust knowledge on how to handle the problem (A)

• Fundamental precondition for working on an identified problem and prerequisite for any kind of transfer: Availability of robust and sound scientific knowledge and evidence
• Researchers have to be experts in the relevant field with excellent knowledge of theory, methods, empirical findings, and limitations.
  • This includes political dimensions of research in the sense of defining and financing corresponding research topics

Step 3: Identification of reasonable Starting points for action (S)

• Many intervention programs and measures do not work everywhere and at all times
• Necessary condition: High expertise in the relevant scientific field that must be combined with a differentiated view of prevailing cultural and political conditions.
• Researchers need knowledge and experience in the relevant practical field and its contextual conditions. This includes knowledge about potential problems and limitations.

Step 4: Establishment of a Cooperation process with policymakers (C)

• Successful development and implementation of evidence-based intervention in practical settings involves various stakeholders and requires cooperation, persistence, time, and money
  • Stable alliances with the relevant policymakers
• Researchers have to consider that there are other influences on government and policy, beyond evidence
  • Values, beliefs, and ideology, which are driving forces of many political processes
  • Habits and traditions, which usually cannot be changed quickly
• Researchers' experience, expertise and judgement influence policymaking, and media: Lobbyists and pressure groups also play a role
• Policymaking is highly embedded in a bureaucratic culture and is forced to respond quickly to everyday contingencies
• Resources are limited; Policymaking is always a matter of what works and what costs and with what outcomes
• Researchers have to find ways to integrate evidence with all these factors
• A certain basic attitude of researchers: It requires that researchers make their voice heard, and sometimes, they have to be very insistent

Step 5: Coordinated development of Intervention and Implementation (I)

• The coordinated development has to be performed in a theory-driven, ecological, collaborative, and participatory way
• Researchers have to
  • Include the perspectives of all relevant stakeholders (practitioners, policymakers, government officials, public servants, and communities)
  • Communicate in the language of these divers stakeholders
  • Meet these stakeholders as equals
• Researchers have to consider parameters for their research work that differs from many traditional approaches
• The big challenge is to find a balance between wide participation and the maintenance of scientific criteria and standards of evidence, as well as between the freedom of science and research on demand
• Researchers must have theoretical knowledge and practical experience in their very specific field of expertise, but the required profile for a successful "integrative intervention and implementation researcher" is much wider

Step 6: Transfer of program implementation (T)

• Several models and guidelines have been proposed by implementation science

Show strengths and limitations of the implementation of PASCIT using the practical example presented.

Step 1: Mission-driven Problem recognition (P)

• Recognized Problem
  • Since 1997, violence in Schools got widespread public attention
  • A joined statement issued by four federal ministers declared the government's intention to set up initiatives to prevent violence in several social domains
  • Government provided financial support
• Limitations
  • Most of the initiatives taken to prevent violence in schools were organized by individual teachers, researchers were not involved
  • These projects and programs were not theoretically based, project goals were imprecisely formulated, and programs were rarely documented and evaluated.
  • Little alignment with the standards of evidence.

Step 2: Ensuring Availability of robust knowledge on how to handle the problem (A)

• Available knowledge
  • Many developed intervention programs, evaluated in numerous efficacy and effectiveness trials
  • Many resources of national institutions have been invested into the implementation of research-based programs in several countries
• Necessities
  • Approach the school as a whole and incorporate a systemic perspective
  • Conduct activities at school level, class level, and individual level
• Limitations
  • Deployment of research findings was slow and incomplete

Step 3: Identification of reasonable Starting points for action (S)

• Starting point
  • Development of a national strategy with policy and advocacy as important pillars
  • Programs that take in to account key factors identified for success
  • Comply with the standards of evidence and consider cultural and situational conditions

Step 4: Establishment of a Cooperation process with policymakers (C)

• Authors tried to convince officials at the Federal Ministry for Education and the Minister herself of the need for a strategy at a national level by advocating for evidence-bases programs and explaining the advantages of a strategic plan as opposed to individual initiatives
• 2007: Violent incidents in schools
  • Public discussion of the high rates of bullying and victimization in Austria
  • Authors received a mandate from the Federal Ministry for Education to develop a national strategy for violence prevention in the Austrian public school system
• They had to cope with the challenge that there was no existing system of collaboration among various stakeholders actively involved in violence prevention and intervention and a lack of knowledge concerning scientific standards
• Intention: Systematically integrate the perspectives of these stakeholder groups in strategy development and specifically consider the application of theory-based and empirically evaluated prevention and intervention programs
• 2007-1 bis 2007-11: Development of strategy
  • Continuous dialogue with officials responsible for this issue at the Federal Ministry of Education
  • Intensive exchange with international colleagues who had been involved in similar national strategies in their own countries
• 2007-12: Federal Minister decided to implement the strategy and presented this decision and the strategy plan in a major press conference
  • Establishment of a steering committee at the Federal Ministry
• 2008: National strategy became part of the coalition agreement between the two governing parties and was designed to last up to the end of the legislation period in September 2013
  • Money was devoted to the national strategy and the activities within the strategy
• Implementation of the strategy continues during the legislation period from 2013 to 2018
• It was possible to expand the ViSC class project into a scholl-wide program

Step 5: Coordinated development of Intervention and Implementation (I)

• Main goals of ViSC program
  • Reduce aggressive behavior and bullying as well as foster social and intercultural competencies in schools
  • Focus on the school as a whole and incorporate a systemic perspective
  • A comprehensive school development project over the duration of an entire school year
  • Activities on the three levels: School, classroom, and individuals
• Elements
  • In-school training for all teachers about basic knowledge on bully-victim behavior and its development
  • School principal and all of the school's teachers were encouraged to jointly develop
    • A shared definition of aggression and bullying
    • Shared principles on how to handle aggression and bullying
    • Commonly agreed-upon measures to sustainably reduce aggression and bullying on the school level
  • Teachers were trained to conduct talks with bullies, victims and their parents in accordance with shared, standardized procedures, in reaction to critical incidents
• Theory-based project at class level
  • Recognizes the importance of the class context for the prevalence of bullying and victimization
  • 13 units
  • Well structured, but open for adaptation in terms of materials and activities used
  • Summative and formative program evaluations confirmed promising results
    • A high implementation quality
    • Out of 52 training units, only one was deemed not to be in accordance with the project goals, 29 units followed the training manual exactly, 22 were in accordance with project goals, but used adapted material
• ViSC implementation model was developed concurrently by the same researchers who developed the ViSC program itself
  • Context and culture of Austrian school system as well as concrete situation at specific schools were taken into account
  • Researchers trained multipliers, multipliers trained teachers, and teachers trained their students
  • Multipliers = ViSC coaches, were trained in ViSC courses
    • Three workshops and the implementation of the ViSC program in one school
    • ViSC coaches were required to hold in-school trainings for the entire staff at their assigned school and to supervise and coach them throughout the implementation process.
    • ViSC coaches held an additional in-school training for those teachers who planned to conduct the ViSC class project and offered them three supervision units during the implementation of the class project

Step 6: Transfer of program implementation (T)

• Primary target groups for recruiting ViSC coaches: teachers at educational universities and psychologists
• 55 coaches were trained (from 2008 to 2014)
• Many materials were provided on a website, which was presented and explained to teachers by the ViSC coaches
• Evaluation of Intervention
  • 26 out of 155 schools in capital city of Austria fulfilled necessary requirements
  • Randomization: 13 in intervention group, 5 out of 13 in control group
  • 2042 students from grades 5 to 7, 105 classes, 338 teachers
  • Short-term effectiveness with respect to aggressive behavior and victimization
  • Multiple group latent change score model to compare the control and intervention group
  • Decline in aggressive behavior (M = -0.23, p = 0.13), no change in victimization
  • Boy scored higher on aggression at time 1 and had lower decreases over time, no effect for age
  • Teachers in the intervention group used more non-punitive strategies to work with bullies and more strategies to support victims compared to teachers in the control group
  • There was effectiveness for both, cyberbullying (d = 0.39) and cybervictimization (d = 0.29)
• Evaluation of Implementation
  • Focus on implementation fidelity and participant responsiveness
  • High variability for both scores: Implementation fidelity ranged from 0.4 to 0.2 (conduction of the prescribed training units); participation rates: 30 to 100 %
  • Multilevel analyses: Teachers' self-efficacy was significantly more enhanced in schools where the ViSC program had been implemented with high fidelity and only teachers with high participant responsiveness changed their behavior in bullying situations significantly
• Results were used to adapt the training of ViSC coaches - Explication of conditions that are necessary for implementing the ViSC program with high fidelity and high participant responsiveness

What are the challenges of implementing interventions?

• Not enough knowledge available on how to increase the likelihood of quality implementation
• Implementation was highly dependent on social saliency of the problem at hand as well as political intent and support as well as the appreciation of a scientific approach
• The authors had to work with ViSC coaches. This resulted in lower commitment of the schools and lower implementation quality in the evaluation study
• The authors recommend convincing politicians and government officials that the initial implementation of such programs should be done under the supervision of researchers and program developers
• Despite a need for intervention, the participation rate as low
• It was not possible to realize the authors' intention in all cases
  • Authors defined criteria for program participation, such as participation of the entire school staff in the program
  • The school principals were asked to get consent in advance
  • After the start of the program, it became apparent that this consent had not been obtained in several cases
• The authors recommend that no other programs should be conducted simultaneously
  • Also disregarded by some schools
• Detailed planning of such projects by researchers is difficult and limitations on different levels-regarding, e.g., cultural context-have to be kept in mind
• The new and demanding challenge is to bring intervention and implementation together in an integrative and coordinated way, in order to achieve success
• The appropriate acknowledgement in the scientific community is essential
  • Individual researchers should not be the only ones engaging in this kind of research; universities also have to include it in their mission
• The authors recommend a discussion of success criteria in academia and that the social responsibility of academics and universities, respectively, will be considered more deeply
  • The current gratification system in science is more oriented to basic than to applied research
• Mission-driven research picking up problems in society is less financed and noticed, the number of researchers engaged in this field is limited
• It is not easy to get robust scientific knowledge.
  • Replication studies are rare and only probability conclusions can be drawn
  • The development of standards of evidence was of high importance
  • The requirements defined in these standards are not as comprehensive as demanded by the I³-Approach
• The commitment of policymakers is crucial. Researchers need to have a great deal of persistence and knowledge about policymakers' scope of action.
• A window of opportunity is needed and researchers have to catch it, the media can be supportive.

Bridging the Researcher-Practitioner Divide in Intergroup Relations

Stephan describes the relationship between science and practice as an intergroup relationship in which the members of the two groups have a different cultural background. What other aspects characterize this relationship?

• Researchers and practitioners tend to come from different backgrounds and could be said to differ in culture
• Their communications differ
• They live in somewhat different worlds
• They possess different domains of expertise
• The relationships between these two typically not hostile
• They generally recognize the common ground they share
• They tend not to be very knowledgeable about the other group
• Each group has been known to look askance at the other on occasion

What characterizes the perspective of practice in terms of intergroup relations programs?

Characterization of Practitioners

• Practitioners are action-oriented
• Goal: Engage in activities that lead directly to improvements in intergroup relations
• They would like to change the world - and they are willing to do so one person at a time
• They tend to work within institutional frameworks (e.g., educational institutions, nonprofit organizations)
• They tend to be holistic in their approach to intergroup relations
  • They are concerned with all aspects of the relationships between groups with a history of antagonistic relations
• They are skilled in interpersonal communication and usually possess group facilitation skills
• Training: Be in education, social work, or a host of other disciplines, but usually not the more empirically oriented in social sciences
• Language of literature and narrative is appealing to them and they are often as attuned to affect as they are to cognition
• They are comfortable with the world of subjectivity
• Rhetoric: Tend toward postmodern
• They have confronted their own intergroup relations issues and are sensitive to the problems those issues can create in their interactions with members of other social groups
• Self-disclosure is a teaching-tool, not an abstract theoretical concept

Characterization of their Perspective on Intergroup Relations Programs

• They are very much concerned with techniques of changing feelings, thoughts, and behaviors
• They recognize practical issues of implementation, sequencing, and responding in the moment
• They may be more sensitive to social context and communication process issues than researchers are
• They are deeply concerned about the effectiveness of their techniques
• Judge effectiveness: Rely on their own assessments or those of other practitioners as well as the responses of the participants in intergroup relations programs
• They often have clear goals, but are less likely to have detailed theories about psychological change processes involved in producing successful outcomes
• They tend to be more familiar with qualitative analyses than quantitative analyses

What is meant by experiental learning?

• The tend to be comfortable relying on their own experiences in formulating techniques
• For practitioners, experimentation means trying different techniques to decide which is the most effective
• They are passionate about experiental learning, but not experimental design

What characterizes the perspective of science on intergroup relations programs?

Characterization of Researchers

• Researchers have typically been trained in the social sciences and nearly all of them have advanced degrees
• They work in professional contexts where publications based on theory and research are valued more than applications of theory to social issues or evaluating social programs
• They tend to be more cautious than practitioners
• Their studies involve enormous time, effort and resources which leads them to be very concerned with precisely controlling everything
  • Control is necessary to increase the probability of detecting causal relationships
• They test their theories by conducting systematic experiments
• By Training and background they are cognitively oriented
• They are more likely to study affect than to display it
• They never ask each other how they are feeling
• They try to be as objective as possible and are less at ease with subjective
• They would like the world to change for the better - and they would love to understand how and why the changes take place

Characterization of their Perspective on Intergroup Relations Programs

• Researchers are more atomistic in their approach to intergroup relations than practitioners
• They are best able to test theories concerned with small numbers of precisely defined concepts which often apply to only a small set of the techniques that might be employed by practitioners
• They generally do not view the degree to which their findings are adopted by practitioners as a measure of their success
• They are fascinated to discover that the concepts they research were part of the lived reality of practitioners
• They are comfortable with measuring and quantifying social constructs
• Most have never encountered a social construct they did not believe they could measure
• They are more comfortable with quantitative analyses than qualitative analyses
• They are never so content as when they can make a compelling case for causal connections among concepts

What follows from these two perspectives in terms of interest in the five aspects of intergroup relations programs discussed by Stephan?

• Five major facets of intergroup relations programs
  • Goals of the programs (prejudice reduction, increasing intergroup understanding, increasing conflict resolution skills, motivating social justice activism, …)
  • Groups targeted and the characteristics of the participants (racial/ethinc groups, religious groups, or genders, the age, sex, social class, and other demographic attributes)
  • Types of programs and techniques employed (enlightement-based programs, contact-based, or skill-oriented programs that employ didactic, experiential, or other techniques)
  • Psychological change processes underlying the techniques employed (empathy, stereotype change, creating dual identities, reducing intolerance)
  • Outcomes of the programs (cognitive, affective, and behavioral)
• Practitioners emphasize programs/techniques, groups, and goals, but they are usually less concerned with psychological processes and they are often not very explicit about measurable outcomes
• Researchers are most interested in psychological processes and outcomes, with some interest in programs/techniques and groups and less concern for goals
• Practitioner-researchers bear the burden of being concerned with all facets of intergroup relations programs

What are the reasons for communication problems between practitioners and scientists?

• Basic problem: There is a lack of knowledge and contact between practitioners and scientists
  • Both groups tend to be only dimly aware of what the other group is doing and what they do know is generally out of date
• Practitioners and scientists find that they do not speak the same language
• Sometimes they use the same terms, but the terms have different meanings for the two groups
• The differences in worldviews and communication styles can create problems
• They tend not to read one another's publications
  • If they do read: They typically find that the type of information that resonates most with them is absent or insufficiently discussed
    • Practitioners: Studies reported by researchers yield information that is fragmentary and often cannot be readily applied to real world settings
      • Practitioners have not welcomed evaluations of their programs nor have they seen the value of systematically studying process variables since they believe they know what processes are operating in their programs
    • Researchers: Practitioners theorize freely and offer interesting hypotheses, but the evidence they view as supporting them falls short of the rigorous standards they hold so dear
      • Researchers have generally not been interested in evaluating intergroup relation programs, preferring laboratory studies of intergroup relations instead.
      • They have not viewed intergroup relation programs as proving grounds for their theories

Inwieweit können die beiden Gruppen voneinander profitieren?

• Practitioners and researchers share the overriding goal of improving intergroup relations
  • They both know and care a great deal about changing thoughts, feelings, and behaviors
  • Thes both have in interest in creating intergroup relations programs that are effective as possible
• Practitioners can offer researchers theories and hypotheses concerning change processes generated from actual experience
  • Their intergroup relations programs are laboratories where these hypotheses and those generated by researchers can be tested
• Practitioners have developed a wide range of techniques that they regard as effective, but the processes associated with their effectiveness usually have not been tested systematically
  • Studying intergroup relations programs may help researchers develop new theories by exposing them to processes they had not previously considered
• Practitioners can interest researchers in a wider range of outcomes of intergroup relations than researchers typically consider
• Researchers can help practitioners understand the characteristics of people who are the most prejudiced
  • Together, researchers and practitioners may be able to determine the best techniques to change different types of people
• Researchers can provide information on the relative effectiveness of different techniques and psychological mediating processes to help practitioners emphasize those that are the most likely to be effective
  • They have formulated and tested theories about many processes involved in changing affect, cognition, and behavior that practitioners can use to create new techniques
  • They can assess the effectiveness of specific intergroup relations programs and help practitioners understand how best to strengthen them.
  • They can conduct comparing the effectiveness of different intergroup relations programs in different contexts or with different groups
  • The can test theories that practitioners already have about change processes

Give examples of strategies to promote contact between science and practice.

• Joint conventions and invitations to members of the other group to their own group's conventions
• Submit articles to the other group's journals
• Invite members of the other group to write for their journal
• Practitioners and researchers can work together to edit books and special journal issues that examine the interface between practitioners and researchers
• Creating a new journal, newsletter, listserv, or website
• Members of the two groups can jointly author books
  • Books on evaluating of intergroup relations programs, or as review about intergroup relations research that applies to intergroup relations programs needed
• They can work together more often on research projects of joint interest
• Practitioners could seek the aid of researchers in evaluating their programs
  • Researchers could make themselves more available for this task
  • They could write articles together and apply jointly grants
• Researchers an write about the implications of their findings for intergroup relations programs
• Practitioners can write about what types of research are needed
• Researchers and practitioners can read each other's journal more often, could use members of the other group as consultants an programs or on research, could take classes from one another of request workshops from members of the other group
• Academics can urge their students to take courses in the other domain or become interns in research laboratories or intergroup relations programs
• They can work together to analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of the specific techniques employed in intergroup relations programs

Gender discrimination

What normative and economic problems arise from the disadvantage of women?

• Normative problems
  • Women are considered a low-status group compared to men: they earn less money and are less represented in high-status and powerful positions
  • These are prejudices and discrimination, although society feels committed to equality, fairness and justice
• Economic problems
  • From an economic perspective, it is a bad investment if women are trained but their skills are not used or are only used to a limited extent
  • Society fails to make optimal use of the skills, experiences and abilities of the genders
  • The quality of the development of new technologies could suffer if women are not included with their experiences, needs and knowledge
  • Boys lack same-sex role models for identity development because there are almost no men (or any more) in kindergartens and primary schools

What aspects does the general term “gender stereotype” include?

• Categorization into men and women is a crucial starting point for person perception
• Stereotyping: Socially shared knowledge about the typical characteristics of the respective group members
• Prejudices: Positive or negative attitudes and feelings towards group members
• Favorization and discrimination: Behavior corresponding to the prejudices given to the group members
• Beliefs regarding gender-specific personality traits
  • Typical woman: Truthful, people-oriented, caring dependent, emotional, passive and concerned about the well-being of others
  • Typical man: Assertive, task-oriented, risk-taking, aggressive and independent
• Gender-differentiated assumptions about cognitive abilities, attitudes, role behavior, jobs, values and physical characteristics
  • Women: Delicate and delicate
    • Roles: housewife, nurse, secretary
    • Interests: less football, more fashion
  • However, the female stereotype changed: it became increasingly masculine, but no less feminine
• Gender stereotypes have their origin in the roles of men and women in society and we conclude that women and men must have different characteristics
  • We assume that men and women were given these roles not by chance, but because of their different skills, characteristics and preferences
  • However, such differences are often much smaller than we assume
  • Stereotypes tend to exaggerate and overgeneralize the actual differences between the sexes

What are the differences between descriptive and prescriptive gender stereotypes?

• Descriptive stereotypes describe how the typical woman and man are perceived in a society.
• Prescriptive stereotypes contain a normative component. They define how women and men should be.
  • Women have to be nice and modest
  • A woman in a leadership position creates problems if she appears too assertive and self-confident

Which terms in the literature describe the personality traits contained in female and male stereotypes?

• Feminine characteristics:
  • Warm-heartedness, communion, expressivity
• Male characteristics:
  • Rationality, Agency, Instrumentality

What is modern, subtle or well-meaning sexism and why is it problematic?

• Prejudices: attitudes and feelings towards members of a group
  • A negative, hostile attitude towards a person who belongs to a group simply because he belongs to that group and is therefore said to have the same objectionable characteristics that are attributed to that group (Allport, 1971)
• Gender bias: sexism, sexist attitudes
• Gross sexist prejudices are rarely expressed in modern societies anymore
• More subtle forms of sexism are described: modern, subtle or well-meaning sexism
  • It also expresses attitudes that can lead to unequal treatment of men and women
  • For example, it can be responsible for the fact that women continue to appear less suitable for high-status positions in a society than their male colleagues
• Attitudes towards the role of women and the distribution of roles between men and women as well as attitudes towards the consequences of women's employment had changed over decades towards gender equality until 2006 (Federal Statistical Office, 2006)

What are examples of direct and indirect discrimination?

• Gender discrimination: Unequal treatment of people based on their gender.
• Direct/immediate discrimination: When a woman or a man is explicitly disadvantaged because of their gender or because they do not conform to the stereotypical idea of a man or a woman
  • Example: Women who, despite objectively comparable qualifications to men, are hired less often than men with the argument "Women are difficult employees".
• Indirect/indirect discrimination: When a measure that appears neutral actually discriminates against women or men (unless the measure in question is appropriate and necessary and justified by objective, non-gender-related reasons)
  • Example: Discounts are introduced for all full-time employees. Despite the neutral-looking regulations, women are disadvantaged because they often work part-time and are then unable to benefit from the regulations.

What factual differences are there (not) between boys and girls or men and women?

Competencies, skills and motives

• Matlin (2004): Men and women generally do not differ significantly in their intelligence, memory, problem-solving ability and creativity
  • Only small differences to the disadvantage of men in terms of verbal skills and reading skills
  • Negligible differences in mathematical skills
    • In early or middle school age, girls often perform better in complex arithmetic tasks, later this difference changes in favor of boys and men, especially in geometric tasks and mathematical problem solving
  • Minimal differences in visual-spatial tasks in favor of boys and men, which often disappear with training and after changing the task instructions
• Male and female students show comparable academic achievements and are similarly motivated to pursue a professional career
• Male and female managers have similar performance motivation, skills and values, and job-related skills
• Female leaders are just as task-oriented in the workplace as their male colleagues and their leadership behavior is similarly effective
• Men lead slightly more authoritarianly, women lead slightly more democratically

School and vocational training

• Women of older generations: lower levels of education than men
• Girls in 2004 were the majority in high schools with 53.9% and in secondary schools with 50.3%
• Boys more often have a secondary school diploma
• Boys are more likely to have no qualifications (every 16th student, every 10th student)
• Men and women are approximately equally represented at the start of the course and at the end of the course
• Choice of subjects
  • Female students in the majority in linguistics, cultural studies and social sciences
  • Students in the majority: engineering, mathematics, computer science and natural sciences
• Motives for choosing the course of study
  • Women: Desire to help others
  • Men: Good earning potential
• Qualification levels of the academic career 2007
  • Completed doctorates 42.2% women
  • Habilitations 24% women
  • Professorships total 16.2% women
  • C4/W3 professorships 12% women

Job and career

• In 2007, 45% of employees subject to social insurance contributions in Germany were women
  • Employment rate for women 63%, men 73%
  • 84% of part-time workers and 67% of part-time workers are female
• Proportion of unemployed women in 2000: 45%, in 2007: a good 50%, proportion of men in 2000: 55%, 2007: just under 50%
• In 1960 (old federal states), full-time female workers earned 41% and female employees earned 46% less than their male colleagues
  • In 2005, women earned on average 26% and 29% less than men, respectively
  • Women receive just over 70 cents for every euro a man receives
  • Work tasks with comparable qualifications or experience are generally paid less if they are predominantly carried out by women
  • Even if men and women held comparable jobs, women would earn 19% and female employees 15.5% less than their male colleagues
• Less than 5% of managers are women
  • Large companies with more than 500 employees: proportion of women at the top management level is only 4%
  • On the supervisory boards of the 200 largest German companies: almost 8% women (around half due to co-determination regulations), on the boards of these companies only 1% women
  • In the service sector 53%, in public administration 39% and in the construction industry 14% of all managers are female
• Balancing family and work
  • More difficult for women in management than for men
  • Female partners of men in high positions often work part-time or do not work at all
  • Partners of women in such positions are usually employed full-time and some are managers themselves
  • Women also take more leave in senior management positions and are less mobile
  • Female managers are significantly less likely to have children than their male colleagues
    • In 2004, 32% of female and 53% of male managers lived in families with children
    • These circumstances can deter women from pursuing their own careers
• Women were still underrepresented in the 16th Bundestag in 2006
  • Of the total 614 elected representatives, 194 were women (31.6%)
  • Compared to the 15th Bundestag in 2002, this was actually down (199 women, 32.2%)
• Despite the General Equal Treatment Act (AGG)
  • Boys are losers in the education system and men are underrepresented in educational professions
  • Girls are the winners in the education system, but women are underrepresented in technical professions, earn less money on average and rarely achieve high positions in universities, business and society

How does gender stereotyping occur in the media?

• Women in the 50s, 60s and 70s were less common overall and were predominantly portrayed in typical female roles.
• Representations of women have not yet moved much away from the traditional and stereotypical image
  • The female gender continues to be seen less often in the role of protagonists on television than the male gender.
  • There are consistently explicit, gender-stereotypical illustrations of women in television advertising
• The "Marlboro Man" doesn't talk about feelings and always has everything under control
• Today women and men can also be seen in atypical roles
• There is an increase in the importance of aesthetic aspects in the portrayal of men
• There are also subtle variations in the depiction of women and men
  • Women are depicted with different postures, different facial expressions, more revealing clothing styles or less head or facial prominence than men

What are Generic Masculine and Linguistic Expectancy Bias, and what are their effects?

• Generic masculine: In German, the masculine language form is traditionally used, even if men and women are meant equally.
  • In comparison to gender-neutral forms, this leads to men being more cognitively represented than women
  • Allegedly the neutralization is difficult to understand, but it has been proven that people have similarly good memory performance across different forms of language (Braun et al., 2007)
• Linguistic Expectancy Bias: Stereotype-congruent (and therefore expected) behavior is described more abstractly than stereotype-incongruent behavior.
  • For example, successful leadership behavior is often described abstractly by men, whereas the same behavior is described very specifically by women.
  • When it comes to unsuccessful leadership behavior, it is the other way around: it is described abstractly for women and very specifically for men.
  • It was shown that test subjects summarized gender-congruent behavior more abstractly and, above all, that other test subjects who read these summaries attributed abstractly described content more to personality and less to situational factors than concretely described content.

Various processes and effects contribute to gender discrimination and reducing women's chances of success. What are these processes and effects and what effects do they have?

Stereotype Threat

• Stereotype theatre is understood as a threat to the stereotyped group
• Group members fear that in a situation in which a negative stereotype exists, they will confirm this stereotype through their behavior.
  • Due to the pressure created to not conform to the stereotype, lower expectations of one's own performance as well as actual lower performance may follow.
• Stereotypes about women: lack of mathematical skills, political knowledge or management skills.
  • Women showed less negotiation skills than men when the stereotype “women are bad negotiators” was activated.
  • There were no gender differences when the stereotype was not activated.
• Men performed worse at recognizing nonverbal cues when they were told it was a social sensitivity test, than men to whom the test was described as measuring information processes.

Lack of fit model, think manager think male phenomenon

• Lack of Fit: Perceived lack of fit between a person's characteristics and the requirements of their job.
  • The professional success expectations of a person and thus the assessment of their suitability for a particular position are more negative the lower the fit is.
  • For example, for men in typically female jobs and for women in typically male jobs.
• Think-Manager-Think-Male phenomenon: Especially in top management, the manager profession is viewed as typically male, since the personality traits required for it are typically associated with men.
  • As late as the 1970s, the term "manager" was regularly associated with "man" by both men and women. Nowadays this association exists predominantly among men and less among women. Female managers no longer stereotype the management position. However, many men and male managers are not convinced of the effectiveness of female leadership positions.
• Failure-as-an-asset effect: Men who fail in a feminine dimension are perceived as particularly masculine and masculinity is associated with success.

Glass Ceiling and Glass Escalator

• Glass Ceiling: An invisible, almost insurmountable barrier of prejudice and discrimination that women encounter in professional life if they want to pursue a career.
  • This blanket excludes women from senior leadership positions and blocks their access to power.
• Glass Escalator: This glass elevator transports men in typically female jobs to higher professional positions at great speed, almost imperceptibly and sometimes with unwanted pressure.

Token effect

• Tokens: Women and men in gender-atypical professions.
• Token effect
  • Due to their extreme minority, tokens stand out and receive more attention, leading to increased pressure to perform.
    • Objectively worse performance can result from this.
  • The differences between tokens and the majority group are often overestimated and similarities underestimated.
    • This can lead to social isolation for women in leadership positions if the majority of men emphasize their solidarity and express this, for example, by excluding women from informal social networks.
  • Tokens are perceived as typical representatives of their group.
    • This can increase the pressure to behave according to the stereotype of their minority group.

Queen Bee Syndrome

• Queen Bee Syndrome: Women who are successful in male-dominated professions in particular agree to gender stereotypes and reject the women's movement.
  • Women in management positions in a male-dominated profession have a negative attitude towards structural changes in order to maintain the organizational culture in which they have been so successful
  • Motivation: The manager strives to stand out from the group of women in general
  • Under certain circumstances, women may experience greater sexism from other women than from men

Sex Role Spillover

• Sex role spillover: The transfer of gender roles to the professional context
  • Especially when men or women hold a token position
  • Extreme minority people are expected to behave according to traditional gender roles rather than professional roles
  • Women in male-dominated professions are expected to behave in accordance with their gender role (empathetic, warm-hearted) even if the professional role requires different behaviors
  • Men in female-dominated professions are expected to stand out through their ambition, strength and leadership personality, including e.g. B. as a kindergarten teacher.

Backlash effect

• If a woman shows the gender-atypical, masculine behavior required of her at work, the perceived discrepancy between the professional behavior she shows and the gender-conforming behavior expected of her can lead to a backlash.
• If a woman in a higher leadership position appears very dominant and rational, she is violating gender-stereotypical expectations. Her professionally appropriate, male-typed behavior can then have a negative impact on her influence as a leader and on the behavior shown towards her.
  • Women always run the risk of being perceived as too feminine and therefore less competent, or as too competent and therefore as unfeminine and unsympathetic.
• For men, a backlash can occur if they do not radiate enough dominance and have typically feminine rather than typically masculine physical characteristics.

What measures can help reduce gender discrimination?

• Coaching and mentoring courses specifically for women and building peer networks
• Introduction of a women's quota: Women should be given priority if they have the same qualifications (positive discrimination)
• Head Hunting: Explicit and targeted recruitment of women into positions in which they are still underrepresented
• Total E-Quality: An association to establish equal opportunities for women and men in business, science, politics and administration
  • Paradigm shift in personnel policy
  • An award is given annually to honor companies, organizations, universities and research institutions that pursue a human resources policy based on equal opportunities.
• Gender mainstreaming (EU guidelines, 1995): The different interests and circumstances of women and men are taken into account in all social plans, as a gender-neutral reality does not exist
  • Primary goal: Change (professional) structures and organizations so that women and men can develop equally
  • Both genders are equally included in the concept design
• Girls Day or Boys Day in companies, institutes and universities to support the participation of girls in typically masculine courses or professions and of boys in typically feminine courses or professions. Children and young people should be shown gender-atypical paths and encouraged to choose an appropriate career.
• Family support: strengthening men's responsibility for the family.
  • Basic requirement: Adequate childcare options or employer measures to support childcare or enable more flexible action.
  • Example: Kinderland Badenwürttemberg - The aim is to expand child and family-friendly structures
  • Support for both parents when taking a break or returning to work through reliable employment prospects that are discussed at an early stage, through contact maintenance programs, re-entry programs, further training offers during parental leave, but also parental leave specifically for fathers.

Focusing the Lens to See More Clearly: Overcoming Definitional Challenges and Identifying New Directions in Racial Microaggressions Research

What are the arguments in the debate about existing definitions of (racial) microaggression? What opinion do the authors of the article hold?

• Microaggression (Pierce, 1974): "Black-white racial interactions [that] are characterized by white putdowns, done in an automatic, preconscious, or unconscious fashion."
• Microaggression (Sue et al., 2007): Include "brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostie, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color."
• These definitions are negatively:
  • Wide open, with boundaries so nebulous and pliable that they can accommodate virtually any and all behaviors that nontrivial proportions of individuals find offensive.
• These definitions are positively:
  • Well operationalized and can be identified on the basis of pathological ethnic or racial stereotypes.
• Consequences of this conflict:
  • Calls for a moratorium on efforts to reduce the perpetration of racial microaggression
  • Increased efforts to reduce the perpetration of racial microaggression and ameliorate their impact on the mental health of Black, Indigenous, and other people of power
• Opinion of the authors: Resolving these conflicts is necessary to reduce misunderstanding and the subsequent minimization of racial microaggression research and, more broadly, to advance this area of scholarship.

What are the biggest challenges in defining microaggressions according to Mekawi and Todd (2021)? What conclusions do they draw regarding these different aspects?

• Intentionality on the part of the perpetrator
• Negative impact on the part of the target
• The authors assert:
  • Racial microaggressions are observable events that occur independently of intention or impact
  • Racial microaggressions are most validly defined by people of color and can have different meanings on the basis of situational context.
  • Intention and impact need to be deemphasized in the definition of racial microaggressions, whereas the role of situational context and issues of validity should be emphasized.

Why do the authors consider intention as a criterion for defining racial microaggressions to be unhelpful?

• Lilienfeld (2017): The use of the root word "aggression" in "microaggression" is conceptually confusing and misleading. Essentially all contemporary definitions of aggression in the social psychological and personality literatures propose or at least strongly imply that the actions comprising this construct are intentional.
  • The concept of an unintentional microaggression is an oxymoron.
• Williams (2020): Deemphasized the importance of intentionality and argued that, "whether intentional, quasi-intentional, or unintended, microaggressions reinforce social hierarchies and are racially offensive.
• Arguments of the authors:
  • They, too, find reliance on intentionality in the definition of racial microaggression unhelpful.
  • It assumes unrealistic awareness and insight into one's own (and others') behavior
  • It implicitly assumes that a racial microaggression can only be harmful, denigrating, or reliant on stereotypes when there is intent to harm.
  • Even without intent to harm, the perpetration of this behavior falls in the criteria of being denigrated on the basis of racial stereotypes
  • Even for ostensibly "positive" microaggressions (e.g., exoticization) that are likely to be defended as "compliments," such intentions do not vindicate the perpetrator from the potential to cause harm.
  • Although necessitating explicitly harmful intent is suggested to reduce the degree to which the definition of racial microaggression is overly "nebulous and pliable", the potential consequences of its inclusion renders the criterion so rigid that very few behaviors can be accommodated.
  • Although perceived intentionality may be important for how individuals respond to and recover from these events as well as how perpetrators are treated by governing authorities, the racial microaggression events themselves are not predicated on the presence of harmful intent.

What conclusions do the authors draw regarding the impact of racial microaggressions for the definition of these?

• Lilienfeld (2017): It is unclear whether any verbal or nonverbal action that a certain proportion of minority individuals perceive as upsetting or offensive would constitute a microaggression. Nor is it apparent what level of agreement among minority group members would be needed to regard a given act as a microaggression.
• Williams (2020): It is not necessary for microaggressions to be interpreted negatively by all minorities for the construct to have meaning.
• Evidence: There is variability in how individuals perceive the same microaggressive event, and individual-difference factors may shape the degree to which these events are harmful.
• Arguments of the authors:
  • Conditioning the validity of a microaggression experience on the basis of how "upsetting" it appears to be to a person of color ignores the broader structural factors that may lead to the stifling of an emotional response, even in the presence of a harmful act.
  • The notion that individual differences in reacting to a particular stimulus does not necessarily change the nature of the stimulus is also not new in psychological science (e.g., in conceptualization of PTSD)
  • An event falling within the definition of a racial microaggression continues to be a racial microaggression even when a particular individual is not personally upset by it.
  • Examining how individuals perceive and respond to the same microaggressive event is nevertheless an important research question that can be part of a larger taxonomy of racial microaggressions.

What does "concept creep" mean? How does it differ from "context consideration"?

• Concept creep: Occurs when concepts "have expanded their meanings so that they now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before"
• Lilienfeld (2017): The subsequent ambiguity can "open the floodgates for respondents' personality traits, such as negative emotionality, to color their interpretation of items"
  • Argued that the omission of specific guidelines "leaves the door open for interpretation biases, allowing individuals to classify certain statements and actions as microaggressions after the fact as a function of insufficiently explicated context factors.
• Arguments of the authors:
  • They agree that avoiding concept creep is important but also assert that the definition of racial microaggressions should stay anchored to observable events while simultaneously recognizing that racial microaggressions may have different meanings and impact on the basis of situational context
  • Outside of a particular context, the same statement would likely not be considered a racial microaggression
  • Asserting that situational context plays a role in determining whether the same statement was hostile or derogatory on the basis of race may narrow the scope rather than assume a particular statement is equivalently microaggressive across all situations regardless of context.
  • We rely on individuals' ability to draw across multiple facets of context to make a judgement about whether a particular event fits within a predefined set of standards.

What arguments were given for construct and item definition of racial microaggressions by persons of color?

• The standards for construct validity are relatively more ambiguous, leaving the door open for questions surrounding inherent bias and who can validly define a set of experience.
• Lilienfeld (2017): Recommended avoiding "the problem of embedded political values" by enlisting "collaborators who do not necessarily share the core assumptions of microaggression research program" when developing microaggression items and "including individuals who do not necessarily perceive subtle prejudice as a serious problem in U.S. society"
• Authors have concerns about the incremental value of such an approach because it is not inherently conducive to moving closer toward "objective truth" regarding constructs related to social problems
  • Amplifying voices of disagreement (i.e., people who do not view an issue as a serious problem) for the sake of increasing ideological diversity does not necessarily enhance validity and may instead undermine it.
  • It is unhelpful when it seems that for some individuals, acknowledging that an issue is a "serious problem" feels like more of a serious problem than the issue itself. Such individuals may be motivated to restrict the definition in service of self-preservation.
  • Individuals who meet the criteria outlined in Lilienfeld (2017) may have biases rooted in their likelihood of directly or indirectly benefiting from the denial of racial microaggressions.
  • There is no evidence that the presence of these voices - particularly compared with the voices of experts in the field - inherently makes the definition of racial microaggression a more "accurate" reflection of reality.
  • Individuals who have had direct experiences with racial microaggressions may be especially well positioned in their capacity to accurately identify microaggressions.
• Sue (2017) emphasized the importance of racial microaggression framework's reliance on the experiences of people of color.
• Fatima (2019) argued that people of color's "knowledge of what counts as microaggression generates from and builds upon the critical reflection of our cumulative experiences of marginalization"
• Relying on experienced observers has always been a part of the scientific process
  • Expertise and consensus among a small number of researchers were deemed sufficient for content validity, even in the absence of basic information about original item development
  • Expertise, previous research, and participant responses drove the definition of trauma operationalized by this particular measure.
  • In relation of racial microaggression, this raises the question of who can decide on a definition and operationalize a construct on this basis.
  • Rather than undermine the validity of the racial microaggression construct, the authors believe that the inclusion of this expertise of targets of racial microaggression is consistent with the process of defining other types of experiences and is likely to enhance, rather than undermine, the validity of the definition of racial microaggressions.

How do the authors define the term taxonomy? What is the difference between typological and dimensional taxonomies?

• Taxonomie (Kotov et al., 2017): A system of classification that helps us to distinguish between and contrast the phenomena we study.
  • Purpose is to provide a comprehensive yet flexible framework for capturing the multiple facets of a phenomenon
  • They are grounded in theoretical and empirical evidence, providing both a roadmap for systematic research and evolving over time as fields advance.
• A key direction for racial microaggression research is to refine and develop taxonomies that capture the phenomenon of racial microaggression.
• Typological taxonomies: Different facets of the phenomenon are placed in discrete categories.
  • Challenge: It is difficult to examine multiple characteristics of an event at the same time, leading to categories that may be oversimplified.
• Dimensional taxonomies: Identify individual differences in degree, rather than kind, along dimensions related to the event.
  • In the dimensional approach, participants rate a given event along different dimensions.

What typological taxonomies have been created in research on racial microaggressions and how are they composed?

• Sue et al. (2007)
  • Set of conceptually distinct racial microaggressions, such as ascription of intelligence, assumption of criminal status, color blindness, and denial of individual racism.
  • These were placed into lager categories
    • Microinsult (ascription of intelligence, assumption of criminal status)
    • Microinvalidation (color blindness, denial of individual racism)
    • Microassault
  • Offered definitions for each type of racial microaggression and definitions of what constitutes the larger categories
  • This typological taxonomy laid a foundation for racial microaggression research and helped to communicate the concept of racial microaggressions to a wider audience in society.
• Nadal et al. (2011) built scales upon Sue et al. (2007) to differentiate the distinct types of racial microaggressions
  • Assumptions of inferiority
  • Second-class citizenship
  • Criminality
  • Microinvalidations
  • Exoticization/assumptions of similarity
  • Environmental microaggressions
  • Workplace and school microaggressions
• Torres-Harding et al. (2012)
  • Foreigner/not belonging
  • Criminality
  • Low-achieving/undesirable culture
  • Sexualization
  • Invisibility
  • Environment
  • Scales worked to distinguish distinct types of racial microaggressions but did not examine the ways in which racial microaggressions may fit into higher order categories
• Freeman & Stewart (2018)
  • Harm-centered typology focused on epistemic, emotional, and self-identity microaggressions in which distinct microaggressions are grouped categorically on the basis of the type of harm they engender.
• Torino et al. (2018) added new categories to Sue et al.'s (2007) original taxonomy
  • Capture different facets of microaggression encounters, such as if the microaggression was personal/interpersonal or environmental, verbal or nonverbal, or behavioral or nonbehavioral

What are the four categories of a new dimensional taxonomy proposed by Mekawi and Todd and how can they be described or what questions should they answer? Which dimensions are classified into the different categories and what do they each include?

Overview about Dimensions

• Microaggressions are proposed to be observable events.
• For a given microaggressive event, we can propose and test dimensions related to the event.
• Initial dimensional taxonomy, articulating an initial and exploratory set of dimensions that are relevant to the study of racial microaggressions
• Four broad categories
  • Target
    • Individual differences in facets of experiencing racial microaggression
  • Perpetrator
    • Individual differences in facets of perpetuating racial microaggression
  • Characteristics
    • Descriptive elements of racial microaggressions: mode of delivery, situational context, valence of content
  • Sociopolitical function
    • Consequences of racial microaggressions related to perpetuating racial oppression and reinforcing White supremacy

Targets Experience

General Description

• What aspects of racial microaggressions predict worse outcomes for people of color who experience them?
• Individual differences among people of color in how they experience, evaluate, and appraise a racial microaggression my help explain outcomes
• Goal: Identify dimensions that help us to understand why racial microaggressions contribute to outcomes
• Rather than identifying characteristics of people of color that worsen (or account for) the negative impact of racial microaggressions, our focus is on identifying dimensions related to how people of color experience, evaluate, and appraise microaggressive events.

Stress and Other Types of Impact

• How stressful, upsetting, or bothersome the experience was for the targets
• There is utility in separating the stimulus (microaggressive event) from the response (stress)
• The purpose is not to avoid the "contaminating" effect of certain negative personality traits but to better understand factors that might help to identify associations with mental health outcomes

Perceived Intentionality

• Intent to harm should not be considered a definitional feature of racial microaggressions
• The perception of intentionality may nevertheless be important in understanding the impact of racial microaggressions
• Perceived intentionality may be associated with greater feelings of hurt in an interpersonal context, more anger, and how individuals respond to racial-injustice issues
• This dimension is useful to inform our understanding of how certain racial microaggressions are perceived and capture a potentially exacerbating factor in the association between frequency of experiencing racial microaggressions and mental health outcomes.

Ambiguity

• Racial microaggressions vary in the degree to which they are ambiguous
• Rather than assume that internal characteristics lead individuals to jump to conclusions in ambiguous situations, it may be useful to assess their perception of how ambiguous context cues might lead someone to evaluate the specific incident as being lower in ambiguity
• In a racial context, ambiguity itself may contribute to distress and cognitive depletion
• It may be useful to examine how ambiguity may be linked to outcomes such as anxiety or rumination

Perpetration

General Description

• What aspects of racial microaggressions predict tolerance of and engagement in racially microaggressive behaviors?
• Perpetrators may have attitudes, emotions, and behaviors related to observable microaggressive events that are important to understand to reduce commission and increase ally behavior
  • Psychological cost of racism or color-blind racial attitudes
• Dimensions such as acceptability, likelihood of perpetrating, and motive may be key in understanding the perpetration of racial microaggressions and thus are relevant to a taxonomy of racial microaggressions

Acceptability

• Focus on attitudes about acceptability while also specifying aspects of context
• Part of the decision to engage in a particular behavior is based on the degree to which an individual perceives the behavior to be acceptable
  • Unique factors, including victim blaming, color evasion, power evasion, and exoticizing
• An endorsement of acceptability was associated with a self-reported likelihood of committing a racial microaggression and likelihood of intervening when a microaggression has occurred
• This approach could be extended such that for any given racial microaggression, dominant group members could report acceptability of that given racial microaggression

Likelihood of Perpetrating

• Self-report likelihood of committing racial microaggressions across different situational contexts was associated with indicators of racism and color-blind racial attitudes and may be linked to other racial attitudes for dominant group members
• Grater self-report likelihood of commission was correlated with ratings conducted by independent observers with how racist or supportive the participant was in a short interracial interaction, providing behavioral evidence that self-reported likelihood of commission corresponded to observable behavior

Motive

• The presence of intent to harm should not play a definitional role in racial microaggression
• Motive more broadly may be an important key to understanding the perpetration of racial microaggressions
• This may shed light on the potentially unique mechanism driving them
• Identify temporal events and processes leading up to assaultive behavior and use this information to guide the development of taxonomy dimensions
• Examine the degree to which microaggressions vary across other motives such as reducing threat
• The acceptability of ostensibly innocuous color evasion and exoticizing microaggressions had notably smaller associations with outcomes than the acceptability of more blatant power-evasion and victim-blaming microaggressions
• The association between the acceptability of exoticizing microaggressions and benevolent sexism was particularly strong, suggesting the possibility of "positive" motives for stereotypes that rely on sexual stereotypes
• Positive motives do not invalidate potential harm, they may nevertheless shed light on factors preceding the perpetration of racial microaggressions characterized as "compliments"

Characteristics

General Description

• Characteristics related to the mode of delivery, situational context, and valence
• These characteristics are directly connected to the experience and perpetration of racial microaggression

Mode of Delivery

• Certain characteristics related to delivery of a microaggression can be used as one factor that determines a target's judgment of ambiguity
• E.g., "verbal", "nonverbal"
• Nonverbal communication in the context of racial microaggressions can be used to modify or underscore a verbal message or replace or contradict verbal communication
• It may be useful to identify how this dimension interacts with target and perpetrator taxonomy dimensions.
• It is possible that microaggressions classified as nonverbal might be rated as more ambiguous by targets and more acceptable by perpetrators.

Situational Context

• Racial microaggressions my hold different meanings on the basis of contextual aspects of a situation that may, in turn, contribute to different outcomes
• The next step for future research should be to specify key aspects of context and to integrate these aspects into theory and research
• Contexts, e.g., interracial interaction, medical provider/patient interactions
• Relative power in which the perpetrator of the racial microaggression holds some degree of power over the target
  • Targets could rate how much relative power the perpetrator held
  • Create scenarios from "higher" and "lower" ends of relative power
    • Researchers could ask individuals to imagine a boss or supervisor made various microaggressive statements. This could be compared with a situation in which the perpetrator was a peer at work
• Contextual elements may serve as factors to manipulate experimental studies
• Theoretically driven research can propose and test the aspects of context that help to clarify under what conditions racial microaggressions are more likely to be perpetrated and to contribute to negative outcomes for those who experience them

Valence of Content

• Rating content of racial microaggressions (not it's impact or outcome) on a scale of negative to positive
• Some microaggressions have ostensibly positive content and rely on "positive" stereotypes (e.g., attractive physical appearance), others are explicitly negative and rely on negative stereotypes (e.g., lower intelligence)
• Valance may be relevant to both experience and perpetration of racial microaggressions and may need to be considered in tandem with the respective experience and perpetration dimensions.
• It is possible that racial microaggressions occurring at unique intersections of valence and perceived intentionality may be differentially associated with emotional consequences for people of color
• The likelihood of engaging in a racial microaggression may be highest at the intersection of positive valence and high perceived acceptability
• Valence related to the content of the racial microaggression may serve as a foundational characteristic relevant to both targets and perpetrators

Sociopolitical Function

General Description

• Dimensions that point to why certain racial microaggressions persist and how they function to perpetuate systematic racial inequality and reinforce White supremacy
• What is the function of a racial microaggression; what does it do?
• Ways in which White individuals directly or indirectly benefit from the perpetration of racial microaggressions and how understanding the functions help us understand the broader context of microaggression debates
• From critical race theory it follows that a structural account defines microaggressions based upon their functional role within an oppressive social system in which microaggressions perform a particular functional role in oppressive social structures
• Microaggressions function to reinforce and reproduce social hierarchies of dominance, such as by reminding lower-status groups of their lower status, contributing to feelings of being an outsider and serving to police or penalize lower-status members for not conforming to dominant modes of expression.
• This dimension helps to shed light on how racial microaggressions function to perpetuate hierarchy, inequality, and White supremacy

Invalidating the Target's Experience

• Microinvalidations: Microaggressions related to "not seeing race" or urging people of color to "move past racism"
  • Function: Reify the minimization and importance of race and racism
  • Evidence that exposing children to color-blind narratives results in less identification of overt racial discrimination supporting the idea of the function of these types of microaggressions is to minimize and invalidate experiences of racism
• Endorsement of a racially color-blind ideology is associated with numerous negative intergroup attitudes
• One function of microaggressions: Invalidate the importance of people of color's identities as well as minimize the continued impact of racism

Othering

• One function of microaggression: Reinforce White individuals and White culture as the "norm" by communicating messages that are othering
• Racial microaggression related to the "foreigner in one's own land" theme may function to decrease people of color's sense of racial standing in the United States while reinforcing Whites' sense of belonging and elevating their racial standing

Dehumanization

• Function of dehumanizing focuses on messages of not being a person
• Animalistic dehumanization: Relating an individual to an animal
• Mechanistic dehumanization: Denying individuals' core qualities of "humanness"
• Equating certain groups with a lack of cleanliness or disease
• Referring to immigrants using dehumanizing language
• Microaggressions can dehumanize people of color in various ways
• Racial microaggressions related to the sexualization and objectification of Black women may function to deny the humanity of Black women by reducing them to sexual objects
• There is the possibility that dehumanization gives rise to the perpetration of racial microaggression, highlighting the potential for a reinforcing cycle