American Journal of Community Psychology

This paper discusses how the organizational cultural competency of social service agencies may be improved by shifting the philosophy of service delivery from a client-centered to a community-based orientation. This analysis is based on two years of fieldwork and interviews that were conducted as part of an action research project initially developed to increase the number of certified Spanish speaking Latino family childcare providers and knowledge about Latino immigrant families in the Midwest. In developing a culturally-specific certification program in Spanish, both the Latino participants and the bilingual program director challenged the agency to consider how the social context and social location of its participants required a more holistic community approach.

This introduction to a special issue of the American Journal of Community Psychiatry is the result of a symposium at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, 2006, that brought together anthropologists and psychologists involved in community based collaborative intervention studies to examine critically the assumptions, processes and results of their multilevel interventions in local communities with local partners. The papers were an effort to examine context by offering a theoretical framework for the concept of “level” in intervention science, and advocating for “multi-level” approaches to social/behavioral change. They presented examples of ways in which interventions targeted social “levels” either simultaneously or sequentially by working together with communities across levels, and drawing on and co-constructing elements of local culture as components of the intervention. The papers raised a number of important issues, for example: (1) How are levels defined and how should collaborators be chosen; (2) does it matter at which level multilevel interventions begin; (3) do multilevel interventions have a greater effect on desired outcomes than level-specific interventions; (4) are multilevel interventions more sustainable; (5) are multilevel interventions cost effective to run, and evaluate; (6) how can theories of intervention be generated and adapted to each level of a multilevel intervention; (7) how should intervention activities at each level coordinate to facilitate community resident or target population empowerment? Many of these questions were only partially addressed in the papers presented at that time, and are more fully addressed in the theoretical papers, case studies and approach to evaluation included in this collection.

A population-based study examined the relationship between diversity of use of the built environment and teacher reports of children’s grades. Diversity of use of the built environment (i.e., proportion of a block that is residential, institutional, commercial and vacant) was assessed for all 403 city blocks in East Little Havana, Miami—a Hispanic neighborhood. Cluster analysis identified three block-types, based on diversity of use: Residential, Mixed-Use, and Commercial. Cross-classified hierarchical linear modeling was used to examine the impact of diversity of use, school, gender, and year-in-school on academic and conduct grades for 2857 public school children who lived in these blocks. Contrary to popular belief, mixed-use blocks were associated with optimal outcomes. Specifically, follow-up analyses found that a youth living on a residential block had a 74% greater odds of being in the lowest 10% of conduct grades (conduct GPA <2.17) than a youth living on a mixed-use block. In fact, an analysis of the population attributable fraction suggests that if the risk associated with residential blocks could be reduced to the level of risk associated with mixed-use blocks, a 38% reduction in Conduct GPAs <2.17 could be achieved in the total population. These findings suggest that public policy targeting the built environment may be a mechanism for community-based interventions to enhance children’s classroom conduct, and potentially related sequelae.