Relative Privilege, Risk, and Sense of Community: Understanding Latinx Immigrants' Empowerment and Resilience Processes Across the United States.

Latinx immigrants regularly navigate adversity and oppression through resilience and empowerment; however, little research has sought to delineate when, how, and why they may engage in either process. Through the Transtheoretical Model of Empowerment and Resilience, this paper examines how Latinx immigrants living in distinct U.S. contexts interact with their communities. Seventy-three Latinx immigrants (ages 18 to 70, M = 40.85, SD = 13.65) participated in 12 focus groups in Albuquerque, NM; Maricopa County, AZ; Baltimore, MD; and Richmond, VA. Participants had lived in the United States for less than 1 to 39 years (M = 14.19, SD = 8.72) and had varying immigration statuses. Analyses revealed that empowerment and resilience goals diverged by individuals' beliefs in the degree to which external change was vital, possible, and theirs to attempt. Beliefs coincided with the fundamental risk posed, based on the interaction of a context's conditions with an individual's characteristics and sense of community. Results indicate that while resilience is important to navigate risky settings, it may uphold oppressive power structures because it is consistent with the status quo. Interventions to spur external change should involve empowering processes, including facilitating gains in relative privilege and fostering sense of community.

Shared Communities: A Multinational Qualitative Study of Immigrant and Receiving Community Members.

Community psychology is central to understanding how immigrants and more established residents of their new settings join together to develop a shared sense of community and membership. In our present study, we explored how newer (i.e., first- and second-generation immigrants) and more established community members form multiple positive psychological sense of community (PSOC) with one another. We conducted a multinational, qualitative study of PSOC through interviews with 201 first- and second-generation immigrants and third generation or more "receiving community members" in three contexts (Baltimore-Washington corridor of the U.S.; Torino, Italy; Lecce, Italy). Results indicated numerous similarities among the ways in which participants constructed PSOC in shared and nonshared communities, regardless of immigration/citizenship status, length of community residence, city, country, age, or gender. Small, proximal, and salient communities were often particularly important to building positive PSOC, which was formed around diverse membership boundaries. As intersectional beings, members converged and diverged on many characteristics, providing multiple opportunities for members to bring diversity to their communities while sharing other characteristics deemed essential to membership. Nonetheless, findings point to significant, structural challenges rooted in power and privilege that must be confronted to bridge the community-diversity dialectic and build strong, shared sense of community.

Bridging the Dialectic: Diversity, Psychological Sense of Community, and Inclusion.

Although, there are many times when P/SOC and diversity appear in opposition, I argue that this conflict is not inherent to the concepts or their joint value, but to social contexts in which they are enacted in real life. The primary values of community psychology-building and supporting positive communities, social change, and social justice within a framework that recognizes the centrality of diversity, culture, inclusion, power, and privilege-actually bind diversity and community together. Thus, we can bridge this seeming dialectic through deeper reflection about the real and intended meaning, operationalization, and application of these two terms, and a reliance on the central values of our field.

Taking a Stand: The Next 50 Years of Community Psychology.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of community psychology, the author looks backwards in community psychology literature and to each side in other allied disciplines to suggest three fundamental issues that are in need of critical reflection and re-evaluation as we move toward the next 50 plus years of our field. These fundamental issues are: Defining community psychology, Doing community psychology, and Perfecting community psychology.

A transconceptual model of empowerment and resilience: divergence, convergence and interactions in kindred community concepts.

Resilience and empowerment are widely employed concepts in community psychology and other social sciences. Although empowerment is more closely associated with community psychology, both concepts hone to community psychology's strengths-based values, recognizing, respecting, and promoting local capacity and positive outcomes. Both concepts also have been critiqued for lacking clear consensus regarding definition, operationalization, and measurement (Cattaneo and Chapman in Am Psychol 65(7):646-659, 2010; Luthar et al. in Child Dev 71(3):543-562, 2000). This deficiency is reflected in the wide ranging applications of each term independently, and is particularly concerning when the terms are used together or interchangeably. Theoretical work on these concepts' boundaries and interaction is lacking. This paper builds on the authors' prior work operationalizing the processes and outcomes of each concept (Brodsky et al. in Am J Community Psychol 47(3-4):217-235, 2011; Cattaneo and Chapman in Am Psychol 65(7):646-659, 2010; Cattaneo and Goodman in Psychol Violence, in press) to present a combined transconceptual model illuminating the divergence, convergence, and interactions between the two. Both resilience and empowerment are fueled by unsatisfying states, but are differentiated by, among other things, internally (resilience) versus externally (empowerment) focused change goals. Goal determinants include context, power differentials, and other risks and resources. These concepts have the potential to facilitate each other, and understanding their interaction can better inform community psychologists' work with marginalized populations.

The hope in her eyes: the role of children in Afghan women's resilience.

Although responsibility for the care, nurturance, and protection of children can sometimes be viewed as an additional stress in the lives of at-risk women, this article describes the ways in which children act as protective factors in support of Afghan women's resilience. The qualitative data presented come from 110 interviews collected in Pakistan and Afghanistan between December 2001 and July 2002 with Afghan women, children, and men associated with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). RAWA, founded in 1977, is an Afghan women's underground resistance organization that promotes resilience through humanitarian and political activities. An iterative coding framework was developed to identify and explore processes of resilience and domain specific stressors (risks) and resources (protective factors). This article discusses the role of children as protective factors for women and RAWA. Although this article explores a unique setting and context, the authors argue that attention to children's role as protective factors may provide an important, strengths-based approach and a useful mechanism to bolster women's resilience in an array of other contexts and conflicts.

Between synergy and conflict: balancing the processes of organizational and individual resilience in an Afghan women's community.

This paper examines individual and organizational resilience processes among members of The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, (RAWA), an Afghan women's underground resistance organization located in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Since 1977, RAWA has used humanitarian and political means to educate, serve, and motivate women and to advocate for peace, secular democracy, and human rights. The authors analyzed 110 qualitative interviews, collected in Pakistan and Afghanistan between December 2001 and July 2002. An iterative coding framework identified processes of resilience and domain specific stressors (risks) and resources (protective factors) at the individual and organizational level. Further analysis found that these process codes clustered by function into components of an operational model of individual and organizational resilience. While individual and organizational resilience are described by the same model, these two levels of resilience were found to operate in synergy as well as in conflict. Although this paper explores a unique setting, we argue that a better understanding of resilience processes in general will come from increased attention to context.

Multiple psychological senses of community in Afghan context: exploring commitment and sacrifice in an underground resistance community.

The study of positive outcomes associated with strong psychological sense of community (PSOC) has grown worldwide. Yet most research explores PSOC as a uni-dimensional (positive) variable operating in a single referent community. Theoretical and empirical literature has suggested, however, that PSOC can be positive, neutral or negative (Brodsky in J Commun Psychol 24(4):347-363, 1996; Brodsky et al. in Psychological sense of community: Research, applications and implications. Kluwer, New York 2002) and since people live in multiple physical and relational communities, there may be multiple PSOCs (M-PSOC) operating simultaneously and interactively (Brodsky and Marx in J Commun Psychol 29(2):1-18, 2001). This paper explores the operation of M-PSOC in the lives of Afghan women, and male supporters, who belonged to a resistance organization before, during and after the Taliban regime. Decisions to join and stay in this community can be explained, in part, through the differentiation of positive, organizational-level PSOC from negative, macro-community-level PSOC. In addition, M-PSOC suggests unique cultural meanings of the terms "community" and "choice." Findings have implications for cross-cultural community work and for fostering resilient sub-communities in the face of macro and societal-level risks and oppression.

No matter how hard you try, your feet still get wet: insider and outsider perspectives on bridging diversity.

Research in which the researcher and the participants come from different contexts and communities always presents challenges. This paper is based on qualitative, community-based research carried out by a U.S. researcher in Pakistan and Afghanistan with an underground Afghan women's humanitarian and political organization. Written from the perspectives of two authors, one an organization insider and the other the outside researcher, it presents some unique examples of diversity challenges, while also illuminating issues that exist in subtle ways even in more common research experiences. Within the context of multiple diversities, two challenges to bridging diversity are discussed: (1) Can or should all diversities be bridged? and (2) Can narrow attention to diversity lead to ignoring similarities? We argue that the definitions of success and failure in bridging diversity are themselves relative terms, grounded in this very diversity. Further, even when research fails to bridge diversity it may, in fact, not only honor and respect that diversity, but ultimately lead to a better understanding of it.

When one plus one equals three: the role of relationships and context in community research.

This paper explores the role of relationships within and between the community of the researchers and the community of the research participants, as they relate to qualitative, community psychology research. Although relationships are salient to all research, their role is particularly prominent in qualitative research, in which a closer rapport is established between researcher and research participant than in quantitative research, and the impact of both sides of this interaction on the research process is acknowledged. Instead of merely looking at the community and relationships of the participants, the usual focus of research, this paper also explores the often-overlooked community and relationships of the researchers and then goes on to look at the impact on the research process of the interaction of these two separate communities. This inside story, while seldom explicitly explored or articulated, has implications for community research in general and particularly for applied research.