Community Psychology

Name: Chandre Slinger

Student number: 44779772

Assignment number: 01

Course code: PSY461Q

Introduction

“ Health is a crossroads: It is where biological and social factors, the individual and the community, and social and economic policy, all meet,” (Frenk, 1994:68). It is clear from this statement that health is essential not only to the individual, but society as a whole. It is therefor important to address all aspects of health not just from a curative approach , but also from a preventative approach. Both community psychology and public health approaches focuses primarily on the prevention of traditional illnesses as well as mental illnesses. The purpose of this essay is to get an understanding of what these approaches entails; how they compare to each other and how they can compliment each other in order to be much more effective in our communities.

Community Psychology

Community psychology is fundamentally concerned with the relationship between social sytems and the wellbeing of the individual in the community context. Thus, community psychologists grapple with an array of social and mental health problems and they do so through research and interventions in both public and private community settings.

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One of the most exciting aspects of community psychology is that the field is developing rapidly and is still in the process of defining itself. It is not easily reduced to the traditional content categories in psychology for several reasons. Fist, community psychologists simultaneously emphasize both (applied) service delivery to the community and (theory-based) research on social environmental processes. Second, they focus, not just on individual psychological make-up, but on multiple levels of analysis, from individuals and groups to specific programs to organizations and, finally, to whole communities. Thirdly, community...