Community psychology ideas are a palpable but minority interest in British psychology. The application of such a perspective is unusual in university-based teaching and research, and where it informs work outside of academic settings, the opportunities for formal evaluation and documentation are limited. The Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology continues to provide a means for the reporting of community psychology studies and initiatives.
In this Special Issue we sought to encourage the detailed discussion of further examples of the development and application of psychological theory and practice which are explicitly sensitive to the operation of power in people's lives. All the papers in this issue embrace a central aspect of community psychology, which is to understand and respond to people's subjective experiences from an ecological perspective. This has clearly inยฏuenced methodological approaches to research and approaches to helping people with mental health problems, so that egalitarianism and participation are maximized in order to address power imbalances, both in psychological practice and in wider society.
Community psychology provides conceptual frameworks which tend to privilege people's own experiences of reality. Many psychological studies using quantitative methodologies or objective approaches to therapeutic intervention deยฎne people's experiences and aspirations in supposedly politically neutral ways which exclude the possibility of recording the impact of societal hierarchies. Indeed, this may also be a feature of some qualitative research and practice which focuses on subjective experience. All the papers included here overtly articulate how their approach to research or service provision takes account of the social position of the groups of people with whom they work. There is no pretence of political neutrality, and the people who are the focus of this issue have been deliberately identiยฎed because of their CCC 1052ยฑ9284/99/020075ยฑ04$17.50