Health Beyond the Individual
Community health psychology widens the lens beyond the individual patient to the community and societal conditions shaping health at a population level.
Social-ecological model: Arranges health influences into nested levels from micro to macro:
| Ecological level | Example influence |
|---|---|
| Individual | Personal health knowledge and skills |
| Interpersonal | Family, peers, and social networks |
| Community | Organizations, norms, and institutions |
| Societal | Policies, economic conditions, culture |
Common pitfall: Treating community health problems as simply the sum of individual bad choices. Environment actively shapes choice.
Partnerships and Disparities
Community-based participatory research (CBPR) treats community members as genuine partners in research, not just subjects. It recognizes that residents hold crucial local knowledge.
Empowerment: Interventions aiming to build a community's own capacity to address health needs, rather than delivering predetermined external programs.
Applied to health disparities, this framework explains persistence: disparities are produced across multiple nested levels simultaneously. Interventions focused solely on individual behavior change, ignoring community and societal drivers, have limited impact.