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The
primary purpose of the community psychology is to seek
the way of improving the quality of the life and the
welfare of a community through research means directed
to individualize (search-analysis, network analysis) the
psycho-social causes of individual and collective
uneasiness and to elaborate together with the individual
belonging to a community some plans (social
intervention-action) aimed towards the empowerment of
the community in the light of the data acquired through
the search on the “field” (what vital context-space
inclusive of the physical, social and psychological
environment).
The ideal would be to operate so that the members of a
community can increase their awareness of the problems
and to help them to autonomously plan the desired
changes, but not always it is easy to overcome the
different forms of resistance, including the lack of a
true tradition about these researches, and surmount the
obstacles that can continually interfere with the
realization of such operational run. On the other hand,
it is true that many psychosocial community-development
interventions appears as “social actions” that not
rarely end with to hardly result distinguishable from
the “political actions”, while in our opinion the
psycho-social operator must be able to remain within his
role of technical counsellor.
The psycho-social acting aimed towards the
community-development can usefully consist in offering
systems of “social support” such that it is possible
to increase the levels of information, participation and
interpersonal communication inside the territory where
one intervenes, strengthening the interactions between
the single persons and the groups that compose the whole
community and operating both on the formal network (institutions,
public corporations, etc.) both on the informal network
(family, friends and cognizant network, self-help groups
and so on).
During one historical period in which finally it is more
and more recognized the value of the collective
participation for the process of social “construction
of the territorial reality” and its importance for the
improvement of the “life-quality”, an important
function of the community-psychology is to furnish to
the territory every mean to levitate all the human
resources useful to the attainment of the “common
well-being”.
We have to consider, for instance, the advantages that
can be achieved through the development of enough recent
methodologies as the “sense-making”, the
“narration” or the “social imaginability of the
places”: the territory can be differently
contextualized, revitalized and, in a manner of speaking,
“tasted again” as shared “environmental unity”
for its symbolic, imaginal and narrative meaning that
interactively unites its members, including the
“symbolic belonging ones” – that is the non-native
figures who somehow, through the participation in
meaningful events, are englobed in the history of the
place and contribute to its narration, as it shows, for
instance, the experience of the Itinerant Seminar
“L’Immaginario Simbolico” that – by means of the
presence of the other, or the different one, or the
foreign – allows new explorations of the cultural
matrixes and the historical Self of the place,
consolidating its identity and renewing the inside
social interactions.
Some of the modern psychosocial intervention techniques
are enough distant from the action-research of Lewinian
memory which consists in promoting, at the same time it
is researched for knowing the problems, the social
actions that appear the most proper for to find a
solution to them.
They show a greater psychological thinness some
methodologies, as the “sense-making”, that helps the
community – which is constructing its own social
reality - to revisit such realizations, to give it sense
and means “a posteriori”, so that to maintain
constant a dialogic vision of the collective run in its
becoming. Also the psychosocial methodologies founded on
the “narration” allow the members of a community
(and the whole community) to know themselves, to
recognize themselves, to historicize themselves, to
reciprocally welcome, to intensify the sense of commune
affiliation, to interact on a deeper level and to
construct together in a truer way. Similarly we can say
about the methodologies directed to strengthen the
“social imaginability of the places.” It is evident,
in fact, that when it is favoured the donation of sense
to the belonging environment and the possibility to
imagine it in its future projection, one achieves a
decidedly pro-social dimension.
Anyway, the local public corporation - if it truthfully
wants to make a community service, to promote the
welfare inside it and to take care of the territorial
empowerment - cannot disregard specific cognitive data
about the social reality and it has to research means
directly derived from those people who daily live that
reality, so that the initiatives aimed towards the
empowering can spring in a way the most pertinent to the
true emergent needs.
The community social empowering first of all has a
positive psychological value because the community,
feeling the closeness by the local government and by a
political leadership dedicate to attenuate the social
disparities and to offer equal opportunities, can more
easily to overcome the feeling of collective impotence
and re-acquire the hope that, by means of the
participation, everyone can develop a real role in the
social construction of the local reality, and, besides
the community can recover the capability to take care of
herself (care by the community) becoming the active
protagonist of the initiatives aimed towards the common
welfare.
Anyhow, any operative intervention that helps the
members of the community to overcome the feeling that
the events are realized entirely in extraneous way to
their ability to influence them (external locus of
control) acquiring a renewed feeling to be able to
engrave on the events and to be able somehow to check
them (inside locus of control) it turns out to be an
improvement of the individual and collective welfare,
that already corresponds, per se, to an operation of
primary prevention.
The problem that the local authority has to resolve is
to succeed in activating cognitive means (cognitive
procedures) which don't involve a great economic
investment, wide employment of operators or long time
and that at the same time result entirely effective.
Probably they have had their days the extensive or mass
surveys (extensive-quantitative procedures) which seem
more proper for market research, while more incisive,
for a community development politic and for an expansion
of the social welfare, appear the intensive-qualitative
procedures on the base of interviews and/or talks
directed to assume data necessaries to analyse,
interpret and elaborate hypothesis for following
interventions. Unlike the extensive-quantitative
researches, that can be valid only and since derived by
a projection of vast numbers whose reliability is
regulated by precise statistic norms, the qualitative
research is founded on the testimony of a non-vast
number of subjects and on the analysis that derives from
them; the main point is, in this case, to resort to
prearranged questionnaires that prevent some eventual
not-registrable digressions by the interviewed (or
better that they don't involve a registration of the
answers when such eventual digressions had to happen).
The structured interview is a modality of research that
can result precious in order to get data and
observations that could be object of possible following
more focused or more systematic researches.
As per the Raffaella Anania’s research, published on
our journal “Psicologia Dinamica” N.1,2,3 year 2002
with the title “Cultural matrixes and transformations
of the community”, it has been adjusted a model of
structured interview which can constitute an important
formula for the development of some more systematic and
widened research-projects. The purpose of the research
was to understand, through the interview, both the idea
of prevailing development within the examined little
communities both the social imaginary emergent through
the interviewed people. A series of enough simple, in
their formulation, answers have been predisposed and
then they have systematically been proposed to all the
people who the researchers have had the possibility,
during the programmed time, to meet within the select
community. The answers were orally set in a dual context
interviewer-interviewed .
The model of search is particularly appropriate and
applicable to some cultural realities not much
accustomed to mass surveys. The model results well
accepted by the interviewed people and it doesn't
determine resistances, besides it has the advantage not
to foresee a direct involvement of the community
official structures and formal institutions. For the
reasons above exposed, it is essential, as per the model
of research, to avoid any pre-selection of the subjects
to be interviewed while it is necessary that the meeting
with the people approached by the researcher, to realize
the survey, happens entirely in casual way. The only
parameters to be respected are the homogeneous
percentage (for sex, age and working activity) of the
subjects interviewed in every community, so that to
avoid that, for instance, in a community prevails a
number of interviewed belonging to the masculine sex or
in another community prevails the senile age interviewed
subjects and so on, otherwise it would make difficult
the analytical interpretation of the data and a
comparison among different territorial areas. The
interpretation of the data is enough easy. The principal
advantage of this action of search is that the possible
interventions for the community social empowering which
can spring from it, for once, are not the fruit of the
thought of a local authority that pretends, from above,
to know what priority the community has need to
accomplish but all genuinely the people think first of
all is essential for the common good in their place of
life.
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