Jean Hill

Psychological sense of community: Suggestions for future research

The research on psychological sense of community leads to few firm conclusions. Among these are the idea that psychological sense of community is context specific, must be understood as involving more than individual behaviors, and should be researched at a community level. It is suggested that research on psychological sense of community could best be accomplished using a multidisciplinary approach and that the assumption that psychological sense of community is on the decline in modern American society should be empirically examined. Finally, it is suggested that in order to have a complete understanding of psychological sense of community, we need to begin to research its related construct, a sense of transcendence.

Stories of relative privilege: power and social change in feminist community psychology.

Stories about community work in New Zealand and Scotland are presented to describe and reflect on issues central to feminist community psychology. Organizing a lesbian festival, Ingrid Huygens describes feminist processes used to equalize resources across Maori (indigenous) and Pakeha (white) groups. Heather Hamerton presents her experiences as a researcher using collective memory work to reflect on adolescent experiences related to gender, ethnicity, and class. Sharon Cahill chronicles dilemmas and insights from focus groups about anger with women living in public housing in Scotland. Each story chronicles experiences related to oppression and privilege, and describes the authors emotions and reflections. Individually and collectively, the stories illustrate the potential offered by narrative methods and participatory processes for challenging inequalities and encouraging social justice.

Where is the Dialectic in the Community-Diversity Dialectic?

Agent-based modeling has provided some interesting investigations of the hypothesis that there is a dialectical relationship between sense of community and diversity. A close look at those models strongly suggests that only models in which the attributes of agents are fixed completely support that hypothesis. Models which acknowledge that diversity is contextually defined, and thus changeable, suggest that there is no inherent dialectical relationship between the two values. Rather, it is the context of the setting, the way in which the setting is socially constructed, that determines whether a strong sense of community can exist in highly diverse settings.

The Role of Ethnic Identity in Interventions to Promote Positive Adolescent Development

This paper addresses the role of ethnic identity in child development. We report on two school-based interventions with a focus on strengthening the ethnic identity of girls, one with a Hispanic population and one with an African American population. We also report on a study investigating whether parental ethnic identity plays a mediating role in African American parenting styles. The results of each study were non-significant in relation to their specific hypotheses regarding ethnic identity. We discuss the implications of these non-significant findings, particularly given that the two interventions were conducted in minority-majority communities.