Douglas D. Perkins

Empowerment theory, research, and application

This introduction to the special issue briefly reviews the meaning and significance of the empowerment concept and problems associated with the proliferation of interest in empowerment. We identify some of the topics not included in this issue and relate those to the many broad and diverse areas of psychological empowerment theory and community-based research and intervention that are covered. We present synopses of each article along with some of the themes and lessons cutting across the frameworks, studies, and applications. These include a wide diversity of settings, fairly representative of empowerment interventions, and, at the same time, improved clarity (if not unanimity) of definitions and measurement, which has been a problem in much empowerment research and intervention.

Finding Common Ground: The Importance of Place Attachment to Community Participation and Planning

This article draws connections between the environmental and community psychology literature on place attachment and meaning with the theory, research, and practice of community participation and planning. Each area of inquiry has much to offer the other, yet few links have been made between them. Typically, literature on place attachment focuses on individual feelings and experiences and has not placed these bonds in the larger, sociopolitical context in which planners operate. Conversely, the community planning literature emphasizes participation and empowerment, but overlooks emotional connections to place. Yet these attachments can motivate cooperative efforts to improve one’s community. Literature across disciplines is examined and synthesized to develop a framework for understanding the psychological dimensions of people’s interactions with community. An ecological model is then proposed that integrates multiple environmental domains and analysis levels. This model can accommodate place attachments and meaning as well as social and political aspects of community participation.

Participation and the social and physical environment of residential blocks: Crime and community context

We propose a framework for understanding the relationship of participation in block associations to a wide range of block-level variables (demographics, the built environment, crime, and the transient social and physical environment. Data were obtained from 48 New York City blocks using (a) a telephone survey of residents (n = 1,081), (b) the Block Environmental Inventory (BEI), (c) police records of reported crime, and (d) a survey of block association members (n = 469).

Ecological assessments of community disorder: Their relationship to fear of crime and theoretical implications

Researchers suggest that fear of crime arises from community disorder, cues in the social and physical environment that are distinct from crime itself. Three ecological methods of measuring community disorder are presented: resident perceptions reported in surveys and on-site observations by trained raters, both aggregated to the street block level, and content analysis of crime- and disorder-related newspaper articles aggregated to the neighborhood level. Each method demonstrated adequate reliability and roughly equal ability to predict subsequent fear of crime among 412 residents of 50 blocks in 50 neighborhoods in Baltimore, MD. Pearson and partial correlations (controlling for sex, race, age, and victimization) were calculated at multiple levels of analysis: individual, individual deviation from block, and community (block/neighborhood). Hierarchical linear models provided comparable results under more stringent conditions. Results linking different measure of disorder with fear, and individual and aggregated demographics with fear inform theories about fear of crime and extend research on the impact of community social and physical disorder. Implications for ecological assessment of community social and physical environments are discussed.

Place attachment in a revitalizing neighborhood: Individual and block levels of analysis

Place attachments are positive bonds to physical and social settings that support identity and provide other psychological benefits. However, place attachments have been neglected as a potential strength in declining suburban neighborhoods. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses are used to examine attachment to the home and attachment to the block/neighborhood for over 600 residents of a neighborhood with a history of gradual decline. Results show that overall place attachment is higher for home owners, long-term residents, and non-Whites or Hispanics. Place attachment is also high for individuals who perceive fewer incivilities on their block, who have fewer observed incivilities on their property, who have lower fear of crime, and who have a higher sense of neighborhood cohesion and control (i.e. collective efficacy). Furthermore, blocks with more home owners, non-Whites or Hispanics, perceived and observed incivilities, and lower fear of crime have residents with higher overall place attachments. Differences between predictors of home and block/neighborhood attachment are discussed and place attachment is proposed as an underutilized tool for neighborhood revitalization.

Disruptions in Place Attachment

A study of disruptions in psychological processes can provide unique insight into their predisruption functioning as well as the disruptions themselves and their consequences. Place attachment processes normally reflect the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional embeddedness individuals experience in their sociophysical environments. An examination of disruptions in place attachments demonstrate how fundamental they are to the experience and meaning of everyday life. After the development of secure place attachments, the loss of normal attachments creates a stressful period of disruption followed by a postdisruption phase of coping with lost attachments and creating new ones. These three phases of the disruption process are examined with respect to disruptions due to burglaries, voluntary relocations, and disasters, with special attention to the Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, flood and the Yungay, Peru, landslide. Underlying the diversity of disruptions, dialectic themes of stability-change and individuality-communality provide a coherent framework for understanding the temporal phases of attachment and its disruption.

The physical environment of street crime: Defensible space, territoriality and incivilities

Abstract This study systematically examines the physical context of crime on urban residential blocks. A conceptual framework for understanding the relationship of the objective permanent (defensible space) and transient (territorial markers and incivilities) physical environment and the subjective environment to crime is presented. Forty-eight blocks were selected from three working-class urban neighborhoods. Data were obtained from four sources: a telephone survey of 1081 randomly sampled residents, a 15-month follow-up survey ( n = 471), block-level police records of 1190 crime complaints, and the Block Booster Environmental Inventory-a new procedure for objectively measuring physical signs of disorder, territoriality and the built environment of 576 homes on all 48 blocks. Five different indicators of block crime were used: perceived crime and delinquency, reported serious and ‘quality-of-life’ crimes, and surveyed victimization rate. All data were aggregated to the block level. Although the various measures of crime were not consistently intercorrelated, objective environmental items correlated more strongly and consistently with the crime indicators than did the subjective environment, even after controlling for the demographic profile of the block. Defensible space features of the built environment, demographics and, to a lesser extent, the transient environment (disorder and territoriality) contributed significant variance to a series of regression equations explaining up to 60% of the variance in block crime. Implications for environmental criminology and for community policing and crime prevention are discussed.

Multilevel Longitudinal Impacts of Incivilities: Fear of Crime, Expected Safety, and Block Satisfaction

Several aspects of the incivilities thesis, or the role of social and physical disorder in encouraging crime and fear, deserve further testing. These include examining individual- and streetblock-level impacts on reactions to crime and local commitment over time, and testing for lagged and co-occurring impacts at each level. We model these four types of impacts on three reactions to crime and community satisfaction using a panel study of residents (n = 305) on fifty streetblocks, interviewed two times a year apart. At the individual level, incivilities showed unambiguous, lagged impacts on satisfaction, fear, and worry; furthermore, changes in perceived incivilities accompanied changes in resident satisfaction and fear. At the streetblock level: incivilities failed to demonstrate expected lagged impacts on either of the two outcomes where data structures permitted such impacts; changing incivilities, however, were accomp-anied by changing community satisfaction and changing perceptions of relative risk. Before we conclude that lagged ecological impacts of incivilities are weaker than previous theorizing suggests, we must resolve some outstanding theoretical and methodological issues.

COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY PERSPECTIVES ON SOCIAL CAPITAL THEORY AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT PRACTICE

Concepts and research from community psychology can inform community development practice by reframing social capital theory. Social capital (SC) is generally defined and measured at the interpersonal, community, institutional, or societal levels in terms of networks (bridging) and norms of reciprocity and trust (bonding) within those networks. SC should be analyzed in a multi-level ecological framework in terms of both individual psychological and behavioral conceptions (sense of community, collective efficacy—or empowerment, neighboring, and citizen participation) and institutional and community network-level conceptions. Excessive concern for social cohesion undermines the ability to confront or engage in necessary conflict, and thus, it dis-empowers the community. Instead of emphasizing social cohesion, “network-bridging” opportunities to increase power, access, and learning should be emphasized. Institutional and community network analysis shows how SC operates at those levels and where to target service resources and develop mediating structures. Psychological and behavioral factors point to factors that motivate individuals to engage in building SC and methods to maintain and improve that engagement.

Speaking truth to power: Empowerment ideology as social intervention and policy

The popularity, and subsequent ambiguity, in the use of the term “empowerment” has created an even greater need for reassessment in the applied context than in the theory and research literatures. This paper outlines some of the areas of community, organizational, and societal level social intervention and policy ostensibly based on the concept of empowerment. These include neighborhood voluntary associations (for environmental protection, community crime prevention, etc.), self-help groups, competence-building primary prevention, organizational management, health care and educational reforms, and national and international community service and community development policies. Issues in applying social research to community organizations and to legislative and administrative policy making are reviewed. Ten recommendations are offered, including the value of a dialectical analysis, for helping researchers and policy makers/administrators make more effective use of empowerment theory and research.