CAPTURING THE MEANING OF COMMUNITY IN COMMUNITY INTERVENTION EVALUATION - SOME CONTRIBUTIONS FROM COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY

Evaluations of community health promotion can underestimate the gains that an intervention might make in a community if the outcomes reported are limited to aggregates of changes in health behaviour or attitude made at an individual level. The notion of 'community' revealed by this type of evaluation is relatively unsophisticated compared to the 'community' rhetoric which often accompanies program definition. Even those evaluations which report policy changes or evaluations of how communities became involved, often fail to capture the improvements a community intervention can make on the problem-solving capacities of a community and its competence in tackling the issues which face it. The essence of what some interventions (intentionally or unintentionally) achieve is, therefore, missed. Empowerment is usually described as a process. But it can be considered as an outcome variable in community interventions if capacity-building is a major activity of an intervention. To capture this in the evaluation design, evaluators should be using active strategies to (i) articulate what empowerment actually means and (ii) challenge what intervention success really means in interactive dialogues with program workers and the community. Active and interactive strategies must be used to clarify program values and intentions because evaluators will be misled or confused by words like 'community involvement', 'community development' or 'community participation' in program documents. These words mean different things to different groups. Similarly, 'empowerment' must be translated into aspects which are recognisable within the life of the program or period of interest. Community psychology is introduced in this paper as a field which may have much to offer in this analysis. Community psychology is a field within psychology which should be distinguished from the more traditional approaches in community-based health promotion which are the legacy of behavioural health psychology.