Concepts in Community Psychology

This homework assignment delves into the core concepts of community psychology. It explores the future vision of the field, moving beyond individual focus to encompass social, political, economic, and environmental factors impacting well-being. The assignment examines five key concepts governing community psychology, including expanding consultation processes, delivering empowerment and systemic change, explaining the ecological perspective, identifying areas where community psychologists face challenges, and acknowledging the limitations of the approach. It also analyzes stakeholder perceptions of community psychology, highlighting the contentious nature of these views based on a case study from Uganda. Finally, it outlines three elements for a professional blueprint: creating a power statement, identifying a niche market, and developing a business plan. The assignment demonstrates a comprehensive understanding of community psychology's principles and practical applications.

Running Head: CONCEPTS IN COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY
Psychology
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Answer –The future vision of community psychology (CP) is a widened one and is not limited to
a conventional approach, which addresses only to an individual focus. Instead the future vision
of CP is integration of social, political, economic and environmental factors on the individuals to
promote their wellness and healthy mindset at systemic levels (Moritsugu et al., 2015).
Let’s take a hypothetical situation to illustrate the future vision of CP, suppose a caregiver in our
community works at a clinic in town. Over the past few days she was engaged in treating
sexually transmitted disease patients. Each day abnormal number of patients were hospitalized in
the clinic and the caregiver gave them treatment one by one; however a situation came out of
control when the number of STD patients grew abruptly. Now the caregiver felt the necessity to
address health department about the critical scenario taking place in his/her clinic. At the request
of health department officer, a community psychologist was called to analyze and take the
situation under control by creating awareness program among people, especially teenagers to
stop the spread of STDs.
Answer – The five key concepts governing CP are
1) Expanding the consultation process of community psychologist in various departments
such as schools, colleges, health care areas or government institutions.
2) Delivering the core CP ideology of empowerment and systemic change to world.
3) Explaining the ecological or environmental perspective of CP to hold the ideologies
falling underneath it into a theoretical framework.
4) Identifying the critical areas where community psychologist fail to achieve their goals
while working with human services agencies.
5) Limitations of the CP approach (Smith, 2015).

Answer - The stakeholder’s perceptions about community psychology are highly contentious as
reported by the International Journal of Mental Health Systems in 2011. The Journal mentions
that an interview was conducted with stakeholders to assess their perceptions of help-seeking
behavior and response on Ugandan people suffering from mental-health problems. The report
says that stakeholders who wanted to help those mentally retarded people by providing them
better treatment got perplexed on the behavior and attitude of those patients who sought to visit
traditional healers to cure themselves rather than approaching to them. Frustrated patients ran to
churches to ask for help from God with the hope that prayers can solve their problems of life.
Problems faced by these stakeholders were many, so the perception they developed about CP
was contentious regardless of the fact that one day their efforts would bring charm in the
province (Nsereko et al., 2017).
Answer – The three elements that will become part of professional blueprint are creating power
statement, identifying niche market and building the power plan. Creating power statement
successfully marks professional blueprint on the people through the involved impactful verbal
presentation.
Identifying niche market that in which manner the goals and objectives of community
psychologist stands out from rest in the market.
A developed standard business plan empowers community psychologist in marking their success
in the world since such plans has possibility to attract people.

References
Moritsugu, J., Vera, E., Wong, F. Y., & Duffy, K. G. (2015). Community psychology.
Psychology Press.
Smith, J. A. (Ed.). (2015). Qualitative psychology: A practical guide to research methods. Sage.
Nsereko, J., Kizza, D., Kigozi, F., Ssebunnya, J., Ndyanabangi, S., Flisher, A., & Cooper, S.
(2017). Stakeholder's perceptions of help-seeking behaviour among people with mental health
problems in Uganda. Retrieved 9 February 2017, from.