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The role of the community psychologist in the 21st century.

Article  in  Prevention & Treatment · January 2002

DOI: 10.1037/1522-3736.5.1.52a

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Prevention & Treatment, Volume 5, Article 2, posted January 15, 2002
Copyright 2002 by the American Psychological Association

The Role of the Community Psychologist in

the 21st Century
Anthony Biglan and Keith Smolkowski
Oregon Research Institute

ABSTRACT
This article describes likely roles for community psychologists in the 21st
century. From a public health perspective, one goal of community psychologists
is to assist communities in reducing the incidence and prevalence of human
behaviors that they view as undesirable. The roles of community psychologists
that are implied by this goal include (a) facilitating community decision-making
about goals and the programs and policies intended to achieve them, (b)
assessing the well-being of community members, (c) articulating which
programs and policies are likely to affect targeted problems, and (d) providing
consultation and training for the implementation of programs and policies. An
infrastructure of national- and state-level organizations will be needed to
support the work of psychologists in local communities. Some of the
implications of this analysis for the training of community psychologists are
delineated.

This article was prepared while Anthony Biglan was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences. Financial support was provided by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (Grant 034
248) and the National Institutes of Health (Grant BCS 960 1236). This article was also supported by grants
from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (Grant DA12202) and the National Cancer Institute (Grants
CA86169 and CA38273).

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Anthony Biglan, Oregon Research Institute,
1715 Franklin Boulevard, Eugene, Oregon 97403-1983.
E-mail: tony@ori.org

This article discusses the role of community psychologists in the 21st century. It is based, in
part, on an analysis of the emerging functions of community psychologists and, in part, on a
vision of what our society would look like if it became better organized to ensure the well-
being of all its members.
 A Goal for Community Psychology
To define the role of the community psychologist, we need to be clear about the goal of
community psychology. We suggest the following generic goal:

To assist communities in improving the well-being of the members of the

community as defined by the incidence and prevalence of problems in the
population of the community, where the problems to be targeted have been
identified by the community through a process that involves input from a
representative sample of community members.

This goal is clearly influenced by the public health perspective (Winett, King, & Altman,
1989), which focuses on the incidence and prevalence of disease and seeks to alter incidence
and prevalence through modification of risk factors. It thereby brings community
psychology's efforts squarely in line with the conceptual and methodological apparatus of
public health, including epidemiology, the investigations of risk and protective factors
affecting outcomes of concern, and the testing of interventions that modify outcomes
through modification of those risk and protective factors. It also aligns the field squarely
with the emerging prevention science paradigm (Kellam, Koretz, & Moscicki, 1999), to
which community psychology has already contributed greatly (e.g., Jason, Billows,
Schnopp-Wyatt, & King, 1996; Kellam, 2000; Lewis et al., 1999). The goal also makes clear
that it is ultimately the members of a community who should decide on goals for that
community. Procedures for doing this are discussed below.

As contextualists, we would not argue that this is the one true goal for community
psychologists (Biglan, 1995). It is perfectly legitimate for others to pursue other goals such
as understanding community processes. However, this goal is consonant with at least two
major concerns articulated in the community psychology and public health literature. One is
the need to affect more than identified clinical cases. To adopt a goal of affecting the
incidence or prevalence of problems in a defined population requires that we go beyond
clinical interventions that address the problems of those who seek treatment. Not every
person who has a problem will seek treatment, and there may be ways of preventing or
ameliorating problems that do not require costly clinical interventions. This concern was
foundational for the creation of community psychology (Walsh, 1987).

Another concern that is addressed by this goal is respect for the autonomy of community
members (Kelly, 1986; Kelly, Dassoff, Levin, Schreckengost, & Altman, 1988; Rappaport,
Davidson, Wilson, & Mitchell, 1975). Community psychologists have long been sensitive to
the fact of human exploitation. When behavioral scientists get involved in efforts to change
cultural practices, it is likely that they will do so at the behest of more powerful interests in
the community or society (Biglan, 1995). Those who define a need for change may not be
the persons who will be affected by change efforts. In particular, there is a risk that minority
group members will be targeted for changes they do not desire and that run contrary to
interests (Kelly, 1986; Kelly et al., 1988). A sensitivity to involving the affected populations
in specification of the specific goals for any community change effort has been a hallmark of
community psychology (Fawcett, 1990).
 Functions of Community Psychologists in the 21st
Century
If community psychologists are going to contribute to reducing the incidence and prevalence
of community-specified problems, they will need to have a number of roles, which we
delineate here.

Facilitating Strategic Planning for Communities

As communities become increasingly explicit about their desire to ensure human well-being,
they will require effective mechanisms for clarifying community goals and generating widely
supported strategies for achieving those goals. Community psychologists can play a key role
in these processes (Fawcett, Francisco, Hyra et al., 2000).

Helping the community arrive at specific goals. Community psychologists can play a key
role in helping communities decide on the specific goals for a community improvement
effort. Should the community have goals with respect to the proportion of young people who
graduate from high school? What goals, if any, should it have with respect to the well-being
of its elderly citizens? How should it prioritize possible targeted problems, and how should
it allocate resources among efforts to address these different problems?

Elsewhere, Anthony Biglan has suggested that behavioral scientists should provide
communities with information about the relative incidence and prevalence of various human
behavior as well as information about the relative cost of each problem but that they should
allow community members to decide on which problems to focus (Biglan, 1995). Thus, one
role for community psychologists is to organize existing evidence about the incidence and
prevalence of various problems of human behavior and the relative cost to the person and
society of each problem.

Such epidemiological evidence is now available about virtually every aspect of human
psychological, behavioral, or physical well-being that one could conceivably want to focus
on. National- and state-level data on many problems are available from the centers for
disease control and prevention and state health departments. Community psychologists can
provide this information to community leaders as preliminary information relevant to the
community's decision-making process. The community psychologist can then organize
existing local data about the behaviors that appear important so that the community is clear
about what information it has on each behavior of possible interest and what information it
may need to gather. A more complete description of the role of community psychologists in
measuring well-being is presented below.

Community psychologists can also assist community coalitions to clarify what community
members want to change. Fawcett and his colleagues (Fawcett, Francisco, Hyra et al., 2000;
Fawcett, Francisco, Paine-Andrews, & Schultz, 2000; http://ctb.lsi.ukans.edu/) have
developed a model for this process. They begin by assisting in the formation of a community
partnership that includes diverse sectors of the community, including leaders in business
government, and education, and members of the community who might be affected by any
change effort. An emphasis is placed on including those who have traditionally been
disenfranchised. The partnership is then assisted in obtaining information from the
community about possible goals. The activities include open "listening" meetings in which
community members can give input about their concerns, the collection of survey
community members, and the collection and organization of archival data that documents
the types and levels of problems that might be addressed.

Developing strategies for community change. Once a set of goals has been adopted, the
community psychologist can facilitate the process of developing community change
strategies by providing information about strategies that have been shown to be of value
elsewhere and by doing an inventory of the community's assets that could be mobilized on
behalf of the change effort (Fawcett, Francisco, Hyra et al., 2000). They can also do much of
the leg work in organizing the planning meetings, encouraging attendance, and summarizing
what is concluded from them.

The Monitoring of Community Well-Being

The increasing use of systems for monitoring human well-being is making it feasible for
individual communities to monitor their members' well-being on a regular basis. Data
pertaining to human well-being are becoming increasingly available. The data include
information about the incidence and prevalence of disease, the most common causes of
death, the prevalence of most adolescent problem behaviors, young people's academic
performance, and economic indicators. Our system for monitoring economic performance is
perhaps the best developed of these "surveillance systems," with data available on indicators
such as unemployment and cost of living for most large communities and with even more
detailed profiles of economic performance available at the state and national levels. The
development of this system has been vital to the more effective management of the economy
(Monyihan, 1996), with slight changes in key economic indicators prompting changes in
economic policy. Surveillance of disease is also tracked carefully for most communities. The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention monitors the incidence of diseases in order to
prevent or combat epidemics.

The monitoring of behavior is most developed for young people. Nationally representative
surveys of youth behaviors, including substance use, antisocial behavior, sexual behavior,
depression, and nutritional habits, are obtained annually or biennially by the Monitoring the
Future Survey at the University of Michigan (Johnston, O'Malley, & Bachman, 2000), the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Youth Risk Behavior Survey
(http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dash/yrbs/index.htm), and the National Household Survey on
Drug Abuse (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 1995). At the
same time, there is a growing movement to assess the learning achievements of students as a
means of gauging how well schools are succeeding in teaching children. Increasingly, states,
communities, and even individual schools are obtaining data on both academic and
behavioral indicators of youth well-being. It will soon be possible for most communities to
obtain a fairly accurate assessment of how well their young people are learning and what
proportion of them are having problems that could put them at risk for health or social
difficulties.

The monitoring of some aspects of adult well-being are less developed. To our knowledge,
assessment of "mental disorders" in representative samples of adults has been conducted in
two studies (Yu & Williams, 1999), but there do not appear to be systems for the ongoing
monitoring of the incidence or prevalence of adult psychiatric disorders in communities.
Also, there do not appear to be any systems for monitoring the well-being of elderly people,
despite the fact that older members of our communities have substantial needs for activity
and support that are not being met.

As measurement of human well-being becomes more refined and its use by communities
becomes feasible, there will be increasing need for communities to collect and analyze this
information and feed it back to its members. Why should communities not have an office of
community well-being that systematically monitors all aspects of the well-being of members
of the community? To the extent that we can put such a "chart on the wall" (Biglan, 1995) of
every community, we will be helping communities make well-being an explicit goal and
guide them toward achieving it.

The skills needed to make this happen include (a) the specification and selection of
representative samples of target populations; (b) the creation, administration, collection, and
validation of survey instruments; (c) knowledge of archival records and their uses; (d)
organization and analysis of large data sets; and (e) effective presentation of data to diverse
audiences. It will probably not be necessary for every community psychologist to have all of
these skills. Rather, it is likely that psychologists in the local community will have assistance
from organizations such as the Social Development Research Group
(http://staff.washington.edu/sdrg/).

Articulating What Works

Articulation of the empirical evidence about the treatment and prevention of human behavior
problems has become a major cottage factory industry of late. The field of meta-analysis has
grown to the point that it is possible to conduct meta-analyses of meta-analyses (Lipsey &
Wilson, 1993). There are meta-analyses that indicate the efficacy of prevention and
treatment interventions (e.g., Durlak & Wells, 1997; Lipsey & Wilson, 1993). Numerous
national-level projects are underway to identify interventions that have been shown through
experimental evaluation to produce benefits for young people or adults. These include the
Blueprints Project (http://www.colorado.edu/cspv/blueprints/), the NIDA Redbook on
prevention (National Institute on Drug Abuse, 1997), the Department of Education's Safe
and Drug Free Schools (http://www.ed.gov/offices/OESE/SDFS/), and the Center for
Substance Abuse Prevention's Program Enhancement System (Substance Abuse and Mental
Health Services Administration, 1998). There are still substantial issues regarding the most
appropriate standards for concluding that a program or policy has sufficient empirical
support to justify its dissemination (Biglan, Mrazek, Carnine, & Flay, 2000), but there is
enough empirical evidence about efficacious interventions to justify these efforts.
Communities are more likely to improve human well-being by adopting these programs than
by ignoring them.

Clinical psychology has developed a well organized approach to developing empirically

based practice guidelines. When community psychology diverged from clinical psychology
(Walsh, 1987), it could be claimed fairly that there was little evidence that clinical
psychology could make a difference for human well-being; community psychology was seen
as an alternate route to that goal. But progress in the efficacy of clinical psychology demands
that community psychologists who are concerned with the well-being of the population be
sure that the best available clinical treatment procedures are available in their community.

The community psychologist of the 21st century will have to know what the empirical
evidence says about the policies and programs that might affect aspects of human well-being
with which the community is concerned. This task will become more manageable thanks to
the developing infrastructure of meta-analysts and organizations that collect and analyze the
results of experimental evaluations of programs and policies.

Imagine that each community's Office of Community Well-Being has an expert who, with
the help of regional or national centers, can quickly identify the most promising programs
and policies to affect each of the aspects of human well-being that the community targets as
important. As the evidence regarding specific areas of concern becomes clearer, and
scientific organizations become more sophisticated in publicizing it, public confidence in the
input of these offices will grow, and empirically based solutions to problems of human
behavior will be increasingly implemented.

Such a future requires that community psychologists be skilled in evaluating both meta-
analyses and experimental evaluations, be knowledgeable about specific programs and
policies, and be effective in communicating this knowledge to decision makers and other
community members.

Consultation, Training, and Brokering

As community organizations increasingly adopt empirically supported programs and
policies, community psychologists will need to provide or broker training and consultation
that assists local organizations in successful implementation. They will also need to provide
assistance to organizations in evaluating existing programs, regardless of whether they have
previously been evaluated empirically (Biglan et al., 2000). This is an area that cries for
empirical research. There are few studies of training in the implementation of empirically
supported interventions; hence, we know little about the best ways to get such interventions
effectively implemented in practice settings. In addition, there are no clear demonstrations
that the effectiveness of programs can be shaped through a process of continuous evaluation.
As the ongoing monitoring of human well-being becomes more common, it will be possible
to assess the effects of such systems on the effectiveness of adopted programs and policies.

The Infrastructure Supporting Community Psychologists

It is unrealistic to expect that psychologists working in local communities will have all the
skills and resources necessary to fulfill these functions. Even the brokering of training will
require some sort of national registry of training organizations. Thus, behavioral scientists
will need to develop the infrastructure that can support effective community psychology in
every community. The infrastructure will include colleges and universities that provide
training in empirically supported practices and in evaluation. It will require repositories of
empirical evidence on interventions. Also, it will be useful if existing scientific
organizations, such as the Society for Community Research and Action and the Society for
Prevention Research, are active and articulate advocates for the practices identified here.

The Internet will increasingly be a part of the infrastructure. The Community Tool Box
(http://ctb.lsi.ukans.edu/) provides information to community members on all of the facets of
community change discussed in the present article. Last year, there were more than one
million visits to the site.
 Training Community Psychologists for the 21st Century
Community psychology programs have the potential to bring about substantial
improvements in how communities support human development. Perhaps the most
demanding implication of the present analysis is the need for community psychologists to
become experts on the wide array of empirically supported programs and policies that would
assist communities. Some of that training will come from courses in clinical psychology and
prevention science that include practicum experience in implementing interventions.
However, it may also be necessary to design a course on how to identify and become expert
about quite diverse interventions for the purpose of advocating their adoption, brokering
assistance in implementing them, and setting up systems to monitor their impact.

Community psychology programs will need to teach future community psychologists how to
identify community leaders and other interest holders, facilitate meetings among them, and
lead them to consensus about objectives and the programs or policies most likely to achieve
those objectives. The training should include communication skills necessary to organize
and facilitate community meetings and procedures for defining group objectives and making
decisions (e.g., Keeney & Raiffa, 1993).

Community psychologists will need training on how to find, aggregate, summarize, and
present data from both national and local sources. Further, universities should teach
community psychologists how to generate additional methods of data collection in order to
evaluate and modify adopted programs to fit the local context. Because the community
psychologist must work in the applied setting, skills in efficient data collection and
summarization should be a priority. Many of the traditional methods employed in research
may be too cumbersome and costly for communities. Most important, community
psychologists need to learn to balance the value of various activities in a way that best serves
the community.

Decisions about the allocation of training resources in colleges and universities are often
determined by an assessment of the current demand for particular skills or types of workers.
But the development of a cadre of people with a particular skill can be the leading edge of a
cultural change, rather than a consequence. In his analysis of the rise of Japanese auto
companies, Halberstam (1987) observed that the Japanese firms gained a competitive
advantage over American companies as a result of the large number of Japanese people who
were trained as engineers. The multitude of engineers meant that auto manufacturers could
afford to hire them to work on the shop floor. As a result, there were many people in
Japanese factories who had the technical skill and motivation to introduce and refine
Deming's quality-control techniques (Geller, 1992). This created a competitive advantage for
Japanese automakers, as they were able to improve the quality and lower the cost of their
cars. This is an example of an organization developing a set of practices as a result of having
a set of skills among its workforce. The supply of skilled people led to the development of
practices that depend on those skills.

The implication for the development of more effective communities is that we may not need
to await an increasing demand for practices such as the ongoing monitoring of human well-
being or training in the use of empirically supported practices. Rather, we may be able to
foster the development of such practices by seeing to it that a cadre of psychologists is
trained to perform these functions. In this way, we will make it more likely that our society
evolves toward communities that minimize the incidence and prevalence of the problems of
human behavior and maximize members' ability to secure the blessings of liberty for
themselves and their posterity.

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