As a discipline, community psychology focuses on understanding individual behaviour in a broader socio-cultural context and, as such, it has dual objectives, that of:
- Understanding people and their actions from within; and
- Their everyday lived circumstances.
It is a psychological method that follows a bottom-up approach at all stages, which necessitates community psychologists and relevant stakeholders to work side-by-side with community members to improve collective wellbeing. It is also a sustainable approach in that it is a democratic means for engaging community members, who, from the start, inform the process and prioritise the issues in planning outcomes that improve their communities. These cooperative principles of community psychology are especially important in the South African context, where the development of psychology is influenced by the prevailing political climate at the time. In the past, discriminatory apartheid legislature and policies dictated to psychological practices that, in turn, corrupted any possibilities for marginalised communities to control their own lives and improve their communal security and welfare. It is, therefore, important that current and future directions of community psychology centralise experiences and understandings that are truly representative of African perspectives.
For the authors of this textbook, the imperative was to create an original resource that is relevant for undergraduate students in the human sciences. Achieving this included contextualising our work in African perspectives, while facilitating learning beyond the attainment of a degree towards further practices in the field and postgraduate studies to come. Academics stemming from varied backgrounds, across virtually the entire South African higher learning institutional landscape, came together to create this textbook, not only for scholarly endeavours but for ongoing community engagement, research and supportive development.
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