Welcome to the special issue devoted to the 2nd International Conference on Community Psychology, held in Lisboa Portugal during June 2008. We are pleased to provide a vehicle for the dissemination of the proceedings from the conference. Contained in this issue are papers from the conference, organized by the Table of Contents.
Empowerment promotion is a major challenge for community psychology. Practitioners’ understanding of change processes and relationship building capacity are crucial elements for this.
We reflect on some methodological and theoretical frames. We consider that the naturalistic paradigm and method can be applied to empowerment promotion, particularly if it is focused on creating change based on people’s voice, participation and actions (Aguiar & Moniz, 2006). Besides, it helps to understand elements, boundaries and timings of change process. So, it can be a very useful method for action research.
We believe that empowerment promotion is a relational challenge and that community development paths are based on relationship building, from the group to the community levels. It is a major challenge to promote empowerment, because to listen to voices of people, to understand their strengths, and to work with them in a cooperative way implies from the practitioners an understanding of empowering aspects of change processes and assuming a role of facilitator.
The challenge practitioners face of combining top-down and bottom-up approaches is also an important aspect that have impact on individual, relational, organizational and community levels of empowerment promotion, where creativity play a special role.
The growing amount of research into patients’ expectations of medical consultations reflects the view of the patient as an active consumer rather than a passive recipient of care. Patients’ care often diverges from their expectations in important respects. Patients tend to receive more prescription and less information. The fulfillment of certain expectations has been related to satisfaction with the consultation that in turn would improve compliance. Patient satisfaction is also correlated with the patient’s reported intention to change physician. The higher the perceived fulfillment of the expectation is, the higher the satisfaction is. When fulfillment is lower than the expectation, the greater the gap and the lower the satisfaction. Today patient satisfaction is considered a key measure of quality of care and patients reporting higher satisfaction were more likely to have a higher quality of life.
“O Sonho” (The dream) is a Portuguese NGO that works in Setúbal – a city 45 Km from Lisbon.
Since 2005 “O Sonho” has been expanding its participation in community settings. In October 2007 “O Sonho” made a protocol with the Portuguese Social Security System, to work for a national poverty ending program – Rendimento Social de Inserção (Social Integration Income), aiming to promote labor, social and community integration of low income population.
This program intends to build with families new tracks for their development, on employment, education, housing, health and civil rights and duties. Intending to build a comprehensive intervention, we have been growing in the areas of microcrédit – building a coalition to give credit to promote self-employment; training – doing and promoting training on health promotion and prevention; food supplies and clothes – building coalitions in order to address serious hunger and poverty situations; and housing – promoting and developing mutualist solutions with families for access to houses.
We stand for the crucial proactive role of individuals, families and communities in their own development, so we assume as core principles for intervention the trust relationship building; and the family’s capacity and autonomy in their integration process – promoting families’ participation and empowerment –, we base our efforts on finding ways to support people on creating new opportunities for using their strengths to grow out of poverty.
We assume an active role on poverty ending and community development, focusing on social entrepreneurship and serving people in its most important development issues.
We believe that this way of creating new supporting structures for and with the community helps to promote community development and systems change.
Literatures on ethnic identity and acculturation strategies - integration, assimilation, separation or marginalization (Berry,1997) - have shown how host populations perceive migrants and that migrant populations may be viewed very differently by the majority group or the larger society. We could understand the complex interaction between individual factors, the individual’s belonging to a group, the intragroup and intergroup dynamics, while bearing in mind that at the same time the dimensions we have mentioned interact reciprocally within the group and with external groups.
For this reason, we have conducted semi-structured interviews with inhabitants – natives and Maghrebian – in an area in the territory surrounding Naples where there is a Mosque and which has a high density of various kinds of migrants. This self-descriptive tool of the interview aims at collecting information ranging from a description of oneself to a description of others and of the context.
With relation to the aforementioned objectives, the participants were selected on the basis of a theoretical sampling: natives and Maghrebian migrants with various characteristics and social roles, with and without reciprocal contacts.
The interviews and the textual materials gathered were audio-recorded. They were transcribed and underwent qualitative analysis by means of the methodology of grounded theory. This is a “substantive theory”, which is derived via an inductive method from the study of a phenomenon, an explanation, an interpretation of a specific phenomenon which is particular because it is built by means of a theory (Corbin & Strauss, 2008).
This study thus intends to identify classification systems which support the representation of the self and of others in terms of belonging or extraneousness in relation to contexts which imply various levels of sharing, participation and trust in order to promote forms of interconnection and planning involving the different cultures simultaneously present in a given territorial community.
In this regard, recognising the reciprocal classifications enables us to investigate the elements which are supposed to be the basis of processes of integration.