Paul Florin

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).

Community Interventions and Effective Prevention.

The prevalence of pregnancy, substance abuse, violence, and delinquency among young people is unacceptably high. Interventions for preventing problems in large numbers of youth require more than individual psychological interventions. Successful interventions include the involvement of prevention practitioners and community residents in community-level interventions. The potential of community-level interventions is illustrated by a number of successful studies. However, more inclusive reviews and multisite comparisons show that although there have been successes, many interventions did not demonstrate results. The road to greater success includes prevention science and newer community-centered models of accountability and technical assistance systems for prevention.

Citizen Participation and Community Organizations

The noted black educator Benjamin Mays said: “nobody is wise enough, nobody is good enough, and nobody cares enough about you, for you to turn over to them your future or your destiny.” Citizen participation creates the potential for schools, neighborhoods, and other institutions, environments, and services responsive to individuals and families. Citizen participation is defined as “a process in which individuals take part in decision making in the institutions, programs, and environments that affect them” (Heller, Price, Reinharz, Riger, & Wandersman, 1984, p. 339; see Churchman, 1987, for definitions of participation in different disciplines)

Who Participates, Who Does Not, and Why? An Analysis of Voluntary Neighborhood Organizations in the United States and Israel

Lack of participation in voluntary associations and the associated issues of why people do or do not participate are major areas of interest in the research literature concerning citizen participation. The present study used three types of variables (demographic, social psychological, and costs/benefits) to investigate the characteristics of participants and nonparticipants in neighborhood-type organizations in the United States and Israel. Findings from analysis of the demographic variables show some cross-cultural similarities (including a surprising lack of race/ethnic and education differences between participants and nonparticipants). There were striking cross-cultural similarities using the social psychological variables. The data from the Israel sample provide important information on the costs and benefits of participation. A discriminant analysis points to the predictive strength of social psychological and cost/benefit variables in comparison to demographic variables. Implications of these results for explanatory and predictive purposes are discussed.

Supporting Community-Based Prevention and Health Promotion Initiatives: Developing Effective Technical Assistance Systems

As research evidence for the effectiveness of community-based prevention has mounted, so has recognition of the gap between research and community practice. As a result, state and local governments are taking a more active role in building the capacity of community-based organizations to deliver evidence-based prevention interventions. Innovations are taking place in the establishment of technical assistance or support systems to influence the prevention and health education activities of community-based organizations. Several challenges for technical assistance systems are described: (1) setting prevention priorities and allocating limited technical assistance resources, (2) balancing capacity-building versus program dissemination efforts, (3) collaborating across categorical problem areas, (4) designing technical assistance initiatives with enough “dose strength” to have an effect, (5) balancing fidelity versus adaptation in program implementation, (6) building organizational cultures that support innovation, and (7) building local evaluative capacity versus generalizable evaluation findings.

Sense of community in neighborhoods as a multi‐level construct

Sense of community is a compelling construct that allows psychologists to examine fundamental questions about how individuals are connected to and influenced by their most important social settings. This investigation uses an existing database of 2,409 residents of 21 neighborhoods in a Northeastern city to examine sense of community at the neighborhood level. The investigation used a cross-levels program to examine whether sense of community can be detected at the neighborhood level. The investigation also tested the strength of the relationship of both neighborhood-level variables (i.e., physical attributes and presence of a grassroots neighborhood association) and individual-level variables (i.e., income and education) on neighborhood-level sense of community. Residents of the same neighborhood were more similar to one another than to residents of a different neighborhood on both the neighborhood-related variables and income and education. When variance attributable to the personal resources of income and education were removed, intraclass correlations for neighborhood-related attitudes (i.e., perceptions of neighborhood climate and perceptions of the ability of neighborhood residents to influence neighborhood conditions) remained significant at an alpha level of .05. However, neighborhood-related behavior (i.e., neighboring behavior and participation in a community organization) was no more similar to residents of the same neighborhood than to residents of a different neighborhood. Neither the presence of a grassroots neighborhood association nor the physical characteristics of neighborhoods examined in the investigation were significantly correlated with a sense of community.

Predicting intermediate outcomes for prevention coalitions: a developmental perspective

Abstract Longitudinal data from 35 substance abuse prevention coalitions were used to examine whether success in addressing initial coalition developmental tasks predicted intermediate outcomes one year later. Organizational climate, member skill development and coalition linkages predicted key informants’ ratings of coalition effects on community norms, policies, and prevention resources.

Building evaluation capacity in human service organizations: a case study

Abstract In response to a number of pressures, local human service organizations have been forced to develop greater capacity to evaluate their own programs. This case study reports the efforts of a state-funded evaluation support unit in Rhode Island to increase evaluation capacity in 13 community-based organizations by means of a needs assessment, on-site technical assistance, a workshop series, and selected model projects. Measures of organizational needs, staff confidence, and agency progress in completing evaluation steps are used to document both the successful increase in capacity and the areas of most resistance.

Cultivating Capacity: Outcomes of a Statewide Support System for Prevention Coalitions

Abstract Although community coalitions are an increasingly popular mechanism for attempting to change community-wide health, the empirical evidence has been mixed at best. Technical Assistance (TA) efforts have emerged in greater scale in hopes of improving both programming quality as well as the coalition structures supporting such programs. However, this commitment to TA interventions has outstripped our knowledge of optimal ways to deliver such assistance, and its limitations. This study takes advantage of results from a state-wide technical assistance project that generated longitudinal data on 41 health-oriented coalitions. The following questions were addressed: What are the circumstances under which coalitions will utilize available assistance? What are the effects of technical assistance on intermediate community outcomes? The results suggested that coalitions with greater initial “capacity” used more TA. Coalitions with low utilization mentioned difficulty in identifying their TA needs as the salient reason for not pursuing these resources. Over time, there were significant positive changes in coalition effectiveness as perceived by key informants, but these were not influenced by amount of TA.

Coalitional Capacities and Environmental Strategies to Prevent Underage Drinking

Coalitions are the most common platform for implementing community-level environmental strategies (ES), such as media, policy, or enforcement for substance use prevention. The current study examines the associations between two types of coalition capacity (general and innovation-specific) and ES implementation efforts and outputs within 14 intervention communities over a three-year period. Efforts refer to the amount of energy exerted to implement an ES while outputs refer to the materials produced through these efforts. Quantitative measures of capacity were provided by coalition key informants and expert-raters. Additionally, Training and Technical Assistance (TTA) provided proactively to improve the implementation of ES was also examined. Greater general capacity, as rated by a coalition informant, was associated with more ES policy effort. Both expert-rated general and innovation-specific capacity, however, were associated with greater ES outputs. Study results also found that community coalitions that endorsed weaker mobilization, structure and task leadership, (measures of general capacity), utilized more TTA compared to those who perceived their coalition as having greater capacity. Moreover, communities that utilized more TTA resources reported a greater number of successful policy changes. The study supports the need to consider both general and innovation-specific capacity for ES implementation and offers promising preliminary findings regarding the role of TTA for improving coalitions’ capacity to facilitate policy change.