Book Review: The Cambridge Handbook of Community Psychology

Review of Caroline S. Clauss-Ehlers, ed. The Cambridge Handbook of Community Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Contextual Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Online ISBN 9781108678971, 694 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9781108492188, 850 pp.

By Ann Scheunemann, Harvard University

The Cambridge Handbook of Community Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Contextual Perspectives represents an ambitious and largely successful effort to consolidate and distill the principles, history, and contemporary research of the field into a single (if large) collection. Practicing community psychology involves collaborations in a range of fields, such as public policy, anthropology, history, public health, environmental science, and sociology, which is reflected in this work through the integration of community psychology into complex and interdisciplinary problems related to community wellbeing. The book’s breadth makes it an ideal read for researchers interested in gaining an overview of the field; while each chapter is germane to community psychology most can also stand-alone, allowing readers to select and read topics in the order most relevant to them.

Additionally, the book’s organization hinders potential anxiety induced by its length; separated into four sections, it begins with foundational concepts before transitioning to sections on research and evaluation and application, and then ending with suggestions for future directions. Applied research that is grounded in current events further enhances the relevance of the book to readers while also facilitating engagement with the topics. The author uses the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests in the first chapter to demonstrate the importance of promoting individual and community wellbeing through better understanding of oppression and empowerment, and the need for multi-level (e.g., intrapersonal, interpersonal, community, and national), multi-systemic (e.g., medical, governmental) resolution of challenges identified within the contemporary context. Subsequent chapters exemplify community psychology epistemologies by providing conceptual summaries or a literature review followed by the application of these concepts to current research, programs, or interventions.

Embedded throughout the book are important themes within community psychology. As an epistemological foundation of the field, power dynamics are exemplified within discussions of empowerment, oppression, critical perspectives, and reflexivity. Community psychology is an applied field; researchers raise voices of underserved populations through the development and execution of actionable, contextually appropriate research. Researchers’ dedication to historically marginalized populations is exemplified in their focus on discrimination against the LGBTQ community (Chapter 28), women in leadership (Chapter 10) and immigration (Chapter 25), incarceration (Chapter 23), and people living with disabilities (Chapter 26) and through work in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities (Chapters 7, 11, 12, and 14). Methodologies used in these projects also prioritize empowerment; community-based participatory action, inclusion of diverse stakeholders, and community feedback were common in case studies throughout the Handbook.

A related theme is context. Community psychology originated to address sociocultural issues, and the field’s paradigm includes the interaction between individuals and their environments, as understanding social and physical ecology is essential to understanding human behavior and finding solutions to persistent and contemporary challenges. The complexity of the challenges described within the Handbook necessitates a multilevel, multisystemic approach that incorporates an understanding of the human, environmental, and historic contexts. Cultural context also impacts interpretation and responses to social challenges, which the Handbook highlights by outlining different conceptualizations of wellness around the world (Chapter 5). The EnRiCH program described in Chapter 12 involves community-based participatory research between at-risk communities and institutions and includes asset-mapping to improve adaptive capacity for disaster response. For example, the lack of mental health facilities in Ghana, paired with the cultural conceptualizations of mental illness and religious beliefs within the country, provided an impetus to explore faith healing camps as platforms for mental health support. In fact, many of the case studies in the Handbook begin with a description of the communities in which the research is embedded — their histories, social and economic tensions, and physical environments.

The Handbook also prioritizes applied and interdisciplinary work, as suggested in the subtitle. Intertwined throughout the book is community psychology’s relationship with disciplines spanning the environment, education, gender, public policy, neuropsychology, and religion. Mental health of adolescents and college students is directly discussed in Chapters 15 and 27, but is also threaded throughout, as within discussions of the impact of social media (Chapter 19) and historically marginalized groups (e.g., Chapters 26 and 28). Education, government and public policy, and public health are commonly part of the scope of community psychology work, and are heavily represented in the Handbook, from examples of local community engagement to revitalize Flint, Michigan (Chapter 11) to improving equity in higher education (Chapter 20) to better understanding the impact of incarceration through a public health model (Chapter 23). The physical environment is increasingly included in community psychology research, including applied research to promote community action after environmental disasters, like in Flint, Michigan (Chapter 11), to promote community resilience following disasters in under-resourced settings in Canada (Chapter 12), and to understand the impact of climate change on migration and issues of social justice (Chapter 21).

A fourth theme — inclusivity — is exemplified throughout the Handbook, as research spans geography, age, gender, ethnic and racial identity, country, and religion. Research involves local communities (e.g., Chapters 11 and 28), schools (Chapters 7, 8, and 27), and incarceration (Chapter 23). Rural communities (e.g., Chapter 7) are represented as well as urban communities (Chapters 11, 14, and 24). Though many chapters focus on communities in the USA, some offer general global perspectives (e.g., Chapters 5 and 26), while others describe research in Ghana (Chapter 18) and Australia (Chapter 22), or situational analyses of climate impact in multiple countries (Chapter 21). Inclusivity is also highlighted through examples of culture-centered research to improve academic performance (Chapter 6) and through work confronting discrimination of LGBTQ+ communities (Chapter 28) and women in leadership (Chapter 10). The last example also introduces intersectionality into the broader community psychology landscape of the Handbook, by providing examples of women in leadership of different ethnicities, races, and sexual orientations. Chapters are also written by researchers who span the globe, from Peru to Ghana, to Canada, Australia, Japan, and South Africa.

A final theme of community psychology is the promotion of wellbeing or wellness, considered as a holistic stability or homeostasis across a system. Within the Handbook, wellness within an individual (human) system includes physical, environmental, financial, occupational, social, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and sexual dimensions that positively affect physical and mental health and quality of life (Chapter 5). Individual wellness is impacted by interpersonal interactions, which themselves add complexity to the wellbeing of larger systems like families. On a larger scale, community wellbeing requires balancing the needs of individuals and multiple smaller systems like neighborhoods and schools (Chapter 16) in a way that optimizes common good and individual autonomy (Chapter 22) while minimizing tensions between the systems.

As outlined in Chapter 5, wellness incorporates the theme of context, as culture impacts values and lifestyles, which in turn influence, for example, how communities support neurodiverse community members (Chapter 26) or leverage institutions like faith camps (Chapter 18) or experiences of migration (Chapters 6, 25). The theme of wellness is applied throughout the Handbook, which makes clear its relationship to all the themes outlined above. By empowering individuals and communities, these systems can advocate for their needs to be met. For instance, the Gowanus Canal Community Advisory Group was able to use public policy to direct local development in ways that support the interests of community members (Chapter 16), and the Newark Anti-Violence Coalition demonstrated the ability of a democratic collective to leverage local resources to address neighborhood violence (Chapter 14). In both examples, success required incorporating stakeholders from across communities, as solutions to complex community problems require the inclusion of diverse community members. Individually, wellness as a community member is facilitated by having a voice in community decisions. Finally, wellness is interdisciplinary, as implied by its nine dimensions featured throughout the Handbook; examples include environmental (Chapter 12), physical (Chapter 17), and financial (Chapter 13) components.

After a broad examination of current research, the Handbook ends with two chapters suggesting gaps and future directions for community psychology. Focusing on research from the early 2000s and her observations while developing the Handbook, the editor proposes that the reality of the research in the field does not yet match the aspirations of social action and empowerment and calls for the field to place even greater focus on the themes mentioned above. Though the research described throughout the Handbook includes examples of community action and promotes equity, constant reflexivity is also essential to community psychology and critical reflection illuminates areas for improvement. The editor provides practical suggestions for how to change the narrative moving forward. Particular topics, including scale development, disasters, climate change, social media, crime, and social policy are also presented as less studied areas that would benefit from future research. In this way, the author bends the narrative back to defining community psychology while also providing a path forward for the field.