Monica Fourie
Student Number: 45918287
PYC4811
Assignment 1:
Unique number – 657794

Monica Fourie
Student Number: 45918287
657794

PYC4811
Assignment 1: Unique number -

CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 1
2. DISCUSSION ................................................................................................................ 1
2.1.

History ............................................................................................................................................... 1

2.2.

Focus, involvement and aim ............................................................................................................. 1

2.3.

Seat of pathology .............................................................................................................................. 2

2.4.

Models .............................................................................................................................................. 2

2.5.

Methods of evaluating interventions for long-term success ............................................................. 3

3. CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................. 3
REFERENCES .................................................................................................................... 4

Monica Fourie
Student Number: 45918287

1.

PYC4811
Assignment 1: Unique number - 657794

INTRODUCTION
“Without a sense of caring, there can be no sense of community.”
Anthony J. D'Angelo

Since the beginning of time conflict and social problems have been part of all communities throughout the world and through millennia people have been trying to find ways to minimise the damage that these conflicts and social problems bring to our daily lives. What people have realised overtime though is that there is not just one solution or cure all method that can influence social problems; rather it is a combination of caring, working together and applying various different approaches to generate a balance that will lessen conflict and social problems.

2.

DISCUSSION

Community psychology and public health are two approaches that are used to tackle social problems. Below follows a discussion on both approaches to gain more insight into how they originated, what similarities and differences they have and how each approach is making a difference.
2.1.

History

Community Psychology
During the 1800 and 1900’s a growing number of people became dissatisfied with the ability and the way that clinical psychologist were handling the demand of the masses for support and treatment, especially after World
War Two, there just wasn’t enough trained people to give the support needed. Psychologists started looking at ways to reach more people at the same time and during the 1960s community psychology began to emerge and today many recognize a 1965 meeting at the Swampscott Conference as the official beginning of contemporary community psychology. At this meeting, the attendees concluded that psychology needed to take a greater focus on communities and social change in order to address the mental health and well-being of more people at the same time. It was only during the 1980’s that South Africa adopted and started to apply some of the community psychology principals that first originated in America.
Public Health
Public health originated in the rural areas of South Africa in the early 1940s.

A group of South-African doctors

started a project in Pholela with the idea to integrate clinical medicine and public health. They realized that a more holistic understanding of the reasons for physical diseases was needed to educate and cure people. Their approach focused on getting to know the residents of Phoela and its environment; they were then able to start involving people and educating them on ways to become and stay physically healthy. This integration lead to a number of health care centers opening in South-Africa. During the 1950’s some of the doctors immigrated overseas and started new public health initiatives in Israel and America.
2.2.

Focus, involvement and aim

Community Psychology
The focus of community psychology is on the masses and not just on an individual in a one-on-one setting as is the norm when practicing clinical psychology. Everyone from the ordinary person to the leader in a community are involved and invited to act together with the guidance from a community psychologist to find solutions to problems that respect diversity and are not judgemental or discriminatory. Community psychology takes a holistic, systemsbased approach and aims to understand people’s behaviour, mental health and the underlying social issues that contribute to problems that communities live with. By creating an intervention specifically designed for a specific community and then applying psychological and social knowledge to their problems; real-world solutions are created and action can be taken immediately. The major aim of community psychology is to create new ways to
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Monica Fourie
Student Number: 45918287

PYC4811
Assignment 1: Unique number - 657794

empower people within their communities, promote social change and diversity, promote individual and community well-being and prevent disorder.
Public Health
The focus of public health, like community health, is also on the masses. However the goal is to reach even more people at the same time not just a community defined to a specific geographical area as with community psychology. Public health focusses on prevention of physical illness and people are reached through national campaigns for example the “Don’t drink and Drive” campaign warning people of the risks of driving under the influence. The main goal of public health practitioners are to educate people on the dangers of risky lifestyles that can lead to life threatening diseases like lung cancer due to smoking and transmittable infections like HIV due to unsafe sex and injuries due to violent behaviour and accidents. Why then are there still so many problems worldwide? A drawback of the public health approach is that interventions are designed from a westernized point of view and can go against the believes and traditions of some cultures, which ultimately means that those people will keep taking the risk that they are taking with their lives, also some people just don’t care about the risks involved and this in turn leads to the fact that some problems cannot be erased from society.
2.3.

Seat of pathology

Community Psychology
Community psychologists believe that the seat of pathology (source of the problem) doesn’t lie just within the individual, as opposed to clinical psychologists who look for the problem within the individual, but rather in the environment and circumstances surrounding the individual. This is one of the reasons for taking an all-inclusive approach to solving problems.
Public Health
Public health practitioners believe that the source of people’s problems is a result of lesions in their bodies and minds and that these lesions are caused by a person’s characteristic like age and education level, disease-causing agents like alcohol and gunshots and then external factors like poverty, social economic status and pollution.
2.4.

Models

Community Psychology
Four models of community psychology have been developed and often only one model is used to target a specific problem. The four models are the mental health model, social action model, ecological model and organizational model. The first two are considered to represent the variances of the field in community psychology and are discussed briefly below.
Focus and aim

Method

Focus and aim

Method

Mental Health Model
Ways to improve and prevent mental illnesses in communities.
Psychologists implement early and large the scale interventions to increase the likelihood of reducing the incidence of mental health problems sooner rather than later. They rely on the availability of a service delivery infrastructure, for example by using natural care-givers from the community to fulfil some of the mass community needs by training them and teaching them skills to educate and support their own people.
Social Action Model
Sees structural inequalities as the root cause of community distress (deprivation of housing, transportation, basic sanitation and medical care leads to a greater amount of problems and mental health because of this deprivation. Encourage communities to put pressure on organizations to bring about the necessary structural changes that will improve the quality of their lives.
Psychologist operates as an activist and takes responsibility to organise, activate, mobilise, empowers communities and to provides resources and contacts that were not there before.

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Monica Fourie
Student Number: 45918287

PYC4811
Assignment 1: Unique number - 657794

Public Health
The four models that developed under public health cannot be seen as four separate / different models that can be applied individually to solve problems, but rather they should be seen as building blocks for each other. Through the years as public health practitioners noticed a certain model not being effective enough a new model was proposed and added on to the existing one, thus creating a sort of network comprising of different support systems to tackle problems on a global level.

Focus and aim
Method

Focus and aim
Method

Focus and aim

Method
Focus and aim
Method
2.5.

Sanitary Science
Human waste products e.g. sweat, faeces, urine, etc. as a cause for diseases and the movement of human waste products in the environment
Implementation of regulations and laws to clean the public environment people live in daily
e.g. rules for where to urinate and rules for proper food storage to prevent it from spoiling.
Social Medicine
Personal hygiene and health, interventions to influence people to take care of themselves in their own home environments, for their own better health not just because a law is being enforced. People were trained and educated on ways to make better choices for a healthier live e.g. eating healthy and exercising.
Community Health
Understanding different cultures with regards to their beliefs and behaviors towards health and healthy lifestyles. Create and implement interventions that are in-line with every community’s way of doing things in order for them to learn how to make better choices for their own health.
Universalistic approaches/perspectives to health were replaced with more relativistic approaches/perspectives. Socio-ecological “New Public Health”
Holistic understanding of an individual, a community, the environment, health and illnesses.
Interventions on national and international levels.

Methods of evaluating interventions for long-term success

Community Psychology
Community psychologists focus mostly on qualitative methods and attempt to build relationships with the people in the community. Their focus is on creating a sort of a pipeline that will carry the knowledge learned from each generation to the next, thus preventing the same problems to arise in the future again.
Public Health
Public health practitioners focus mainly on quantitative methods for example questionnaires, surveys, statistics, etc. to collect data and concrete evidence in order to measure if campaigns and interventions are having the desired effect on a problem that needed to be addressed. Results are constantly measured and adjusted where needed to ensure long-term success.

3.

CONCLUSION

As can be seen from the discussion above community psychology and public health share many of the same methods, theories and approaches. Both focus on prevention and empowerment and attempt to introduce and influence people individually and as communities to make better choices in life. One of the main differences between community psychology and public health is where their focus is with regards to prevention as can be seen from the discussion above. Community psychology is still a developing field and some ideas for interventions sounds good in theory but could not have been implemented yet, whereas public health has made an impact and some successes have been recorded. Both approaches have already made a difference to people’s lives and will continue to make a difference if practitioners keep caring about their work, keep sharing the knowledge and experiences learned from their different approaches and interventions with each other.

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Monica Fourie
Student Number: 45918287

PYC4811
Assignment 1: Unique number - 657794

REFERENCES
 Brainyquote. 2015. Community. [Online] http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/community.html
(Accessed 9 March 2015)
 Psychology About. 2015. Community Psychology. [Online] http://psychology.about.com/od/branchesofpsycholog1/a/community-psychology.htm (Accessed 11 March 2015)
 Sabinet. 2015. Community Oriented Primary Care and Transformation. [Online] http://reference.sabinet.co.za/sa_epublication_article/aa_afren_v3_n4_a16 (Accessed 23 March 2015)
 University of South Africa. Department of Psychology. 2014. Community and Health Psychology. Tutorial Letter
102 for PYC4811. Muckleneuk Pretoria.

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