The crux of the thesis advanced in this special issue is that by merging the psychological with the political, community psychology can, and should, explicitly address social power. This thesis is advanced by Isaac Prilleltensky, who, in the lead article (pp. 116-136), discusses the central role of power in research on wellness, oppression, and liberation. He has become concerned that the work of community psychology has little effect on the basic problems of humankind and further asserts that this limited impact is because the field has not worked directly with power at the collective level. Empowerment, the field's major phenomena of interest, seems typically to be constrained in both definition and measurement at the person level. With the concept of psychopolitical validity, Prilleltensky proposes measuring the psychological and political simultaneously. When an intervention is valid-both psychologically and politically-he hypothesizes that forces yielding ill-health and oppression will be diminished and those that enhance wellness and liberation will be increased. He offers two types of psychopolitical validity and describes how he would approach each empirically: Epistemic approaches integrate psychological and political power into community psychology studies; and transformative approaches move intervention beyond ameliorative efforts towards structural change. This conceptualization is set forward to share his thinking about what is central and important in community psychology.
Psychopolitical validity is a strategy for bringing a research criterion-validityinto a substantive rather than just a methodological domain. That is, an important dimension to the validity of a research study is not just the process applied to studying