Psy4202 community psychology Week 8 - Assignment: Evaluate a Community Intervention Program

Community psychology entails the study of the behaviour of humans within its multifaceted cultural, sociopolitical, ecological, and historical contexts. It plays a significant role in dealing with social issues within a community. The five most significant social problems facing my community include human rights, education, poverty, social justice, and discrimination. I will address the issue of human rights, the values of community psychology that are relevant to this issue include community participation and empowerment. Human rights are centred on the universalization of human beings as well as its social foundations (Seedat, Suffla, & Christie, 2017). This basis has a vital link to the framework of community psychology that considers the development of individuals within social settings that exemplify their acting and thinking. The significance of community participation and empowerment may motivate personal identity and bring about interactions within and between communal organizations.

Firstly, the psychology of community participation may bolster the recognition of the mechanisms that result in increased division and devising techniques to deal with the resultant issues. Research has shown that the previous peaceful coexistence of 2 fictitious communal groups turned intense and contentious once the competition for resources was developed as a variable within the interaction of the two groups. This discovery provides an essential insight to comprehending how scarcity may trigger the violation of human rights (Seedat, Suffla, & Christie, 2017). Secondly, community psychology may offer significant empirical evidence and methodological devices to boost abstract claims intrinsic to human rights. These methodological tools have been implemented in social right studies along with a thematic narrative evaluation to research how human rights conceptions are created by people. As such, community participation provides research and supports possibilities that may advance the human rights field. Thirdly, community empowerment may provide a basis for increased advocacy for human rights (Seedat, Suffla, & Christie, 2017). For instance, the liberation psychology drive promoted active community participation in the empowerment of the rights of the oppressed in addition to campaigning for the combatting of structural injustice.

References

Seedat, M., Suffla, S., & Christie, D. J. (2017). Emancipatory and Participatory Methodologies in Peace, Critical, and Community Psychology. Cham: Springer International Publishing.