The Made in Africa Evaluation (MAE) framework is a decolonial approach to program evaluation developed by African evaluators over the past 14 years. MAE may be appropriate to community psychologists who practice program evaluation or conduct research in Africa, but little is known about its implementation. We conducted a scoping review to map the existing literature on MAE, examine its core practice tenets, explore how its principles are currently being operationalized, and identify gaps in the MAE literature. Eligible articles (N = 53) included primary conceptual papers, case studies and seminal conference proceedings that were published between 2012 and 2026. Findings indicated a strong focus on the use of Indigenous methods and Ubuntu philosophy, African ownership of evaluation processes and findings, and social transformation aligned with African values. Major gaps include few case studies of applying MAE and limited guidance on applying Ubuntu ethics in evaluation practice. MAE's values align closely with community psychology's core values of community self-determination and collaborative action in pursuit of social justice. MAE holds promise to guide reflexive international evaluation practice within community psychology. Future research should explore how MAE is being applied and how it can be adapted across diverse practice contexts pertinent to community psychology.
Studies on Happiness in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other sexual and gender diverse (SGD) populations are limited and have, in a majority of cases, been studied in Western populations. Prior popular frameworks to explain well-being in SGD populations include minority stress and Bourdieu's forms of capital, though few have integrated these frameworks. We leverage structural equation models, integrating these constructs to examine the relative influence of forms of capital and stigma on happiness among a large sample of culturally and linguistically Chinese SGD populations. The present analysis uses a cross-sectional mixed-gender analytic convenience sample of SGD Chinese people (N = 8694). Structural equation models integrating multiple forms of capital (social, sexual, and economic) and stigma were fit, including models stratified by gender minority status. In the full sample, there was evidence of three significant pathways from the forms of capital on happiness. Social capital R2 = 0.09 and economic capital R2 = 0.04 have significant direct effects on Happiness. Stratified results are presented. Future studies should examine the interplay of minority stress, social, sexual, and economic capitals with culturally specific predictors to identify and refine appropriate frameworks for understanding happiness among SGD populations.
Expanding understandings of immigration as a determinant of health, this paper examines how border violence operates as an enduring socio-structural regime, shaping Latinx immigrants' experiences of safety, (in)security, and well-being in the U.S. Drawing on 30 semi-structured interviews conducted as part of a larger community-based participatory research project, we trace how participants interpret violence and insecurity across pre-migration, migration and post-migration contexts and multiple levels (individual, community and structural). Rather than conceptualizing borders as static lines or migration as a singular event, we conceptualize border violence as a transnational and temporal regime that governs mobility, produces precarity, and structures everyday life long after settlement. Participants' narratives reveal how: (1) structural exclusion and economic insecurity shape perceptions of risk and vulnerability across space and time, (2) how neighborhood-level precarity, securitization, surveillance, and constrained mobility undermine stability and well-being, and (3) how safety is negotiated through relational, symbolic, and material strategies within immigrant communities. By centering migrant' lived interpretations of safety and (in)security, this study advances a socio-structural framework that moves beyond individual or behavioral models of immigrant well-being and highlights border violence as a multiscalar condition that permeates immigrants' lives and shapes their everyday survival.
This study investigates whether coaching enhances the well-being of refugees after their housing needs are met. Forty-two refugees in Greece participated in a year-long project, with participants matched on basic characteristics and randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. Both groups received 1 year of free housing, while the experimental group also received coaching. Housing was treated as a confounding variable, with coaching as the experimental intervention. Data were collected at three phases: immediately after housing was provided, after coaching, and 3 months after coaching ended. For ethical reasons, the control group received coaching after data collection. Mixed methods, using the WHO-5 well-being questionnaire and qualitative interviews, were used for data analysis. Results showed that coaching significantly improved the well-being of the experimental group, while the control group's well-being remained unchanged. Additionally, refugee well-being of the experimental group continued to increase between Phase 2 and Phase 3. Interpreted through a community psychology lens, the findings suggest that the combination of structural (housing) and relational supports (coaching) contributes to the integration of refugees by enhancing refugees' sense of stability and by strengthening their empowerment and agency.
One of the principal features of successful community governance is that it is collaborative and thus dependent on a community's ability to work together. However, there are no valid, comprehensive means to assess a community's capacity to respond to civic challenges in collaborative ways, and that are predictive of community resilience and well-being. In this study, we describe the conceptual foundations of the Civic Capacity Index (CCI) and the multiple methods used to validate it. Findings from a large statewide sample show the CCI's scales to have high internal reliabilities and conform to a bifactor model, using confirmatory factor analysis. As hypothesized, CCI scores are predictive of multiple measures of community processes that in theory should be related to civic capacity; e.g., trust in governance, social control and cohesion, and community connectedness; public health indicators such as child abuse and suicide rates; and especially community resilience and well-being, even a year after baseline. The empirical findings align with the conceptual basis of the CCI, in particular, the association between a community's civic capacity and resilience. This tight-knit relationship has profound implications for promoting community resilience by building civic capacity.
Effective implementation of parenting programs relies on multiple factors, particularly the role of facilitators who actively deliver and support the intervention. Facilitators' champion behaviors or the efforts they make to encourage implementation, can positively impact the outcomes of these programs. The present study examined the predictors of facilitators' champion behaviors when delivering the ACT-Raising Safe Kids Program in public services in an upper-middle-income country. The sample comprised 131 facilitators from 26 municipalities in Brazil. Participants completed self-report questionnaires addressing sociodemographic and background characteristics, self-regulation, resource availability, and champion behaviors. A partially latent structural equation model (SEM) was used to test direct and indirect relations between these variables. To support the SEM, we also conducted a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to assess the psychometric properties of the instruments. The results revealed that facilitators' self-regulation and resource availability significantly and positively predicted facilitators' personal champion behaviors, but not their public behaviors. Facilitators' self-regulation served as a mechanism explaining the positive relation between resource availability and personal champion behaviors. The findings highlight the relevance of facilitators' behaviors in delivering the program to families, as well as the importance of organizational resources for intervention implementation in public services.
While youth participatory action research (YPAR), a youth-adult partnered or youth-led approach to knowledge generation and social change, has burgeoned over the last decade, challenges remain related to capacity for its implementation. Yet, the field lacks a YPAR implementation capacity framework. Here, we created a YPAR implementation capacity framework by adapting a key domain (innovation-specific capacity) of a foundational organizational readiness framework that had previously been applied to YPAR conceptually but not empirically. Using literature from a systematic review of YPAR articles reporting youth and environmental outcomes (2015-2022, N = 53), we inductively formed four YPAR implementation capacity domains: (1) resources; (2) training, preparation, and support; (3) relationships within and across systems; (4) characteristics of the YPAR team. We also identified facilitators and barriers of YPAR implementation capacity that we categorized into subdomains. We modified the original innovation-specific capacity construct based on the domains we identified in the literature to begin to create a YPAR implementation capacity framework, intended to set the stage for continued theory building and planning for YPAR.
Families' experience of homelessness is typically examined from the perspective of parents during or shortly after a shelter stay. Parents complain about rules, surveillance, crowding, and challenges to parenting in both homeless shelters and in doubling up with other households (sharing the others' homes), and relief when they attain their own place. The current study uses qualitative interviews to examine the retrospective views of housing and homelessness among young adults who were homeless as children with their families. We compare their perspectives to earlier reports of parents' contemporaneous experiences of similar settings. The 22 young adults interviewed in 2024-25 were children in families recruited from 16 homeless shelters in 10 states in 2010-2012 by the Family Options Study. They share many of parents' perspectives but focus on largely positive social relationships in all housing situations. They report ongoing housing instability, difficult experiences of racism in housing programs, and landlords who forced moves, but also their parents' and their own coping and resilience in the face of hardship. Policy implications include the need to address racial equity in the homeless service system. Reducing the shortage of affordable housing would not only reduce homelessness but also give households more leverage with landlords.
Social science research has documented the adverse mental health outcomes of U.S. immigration enforcement activity on Latinx immigrant individuals and families. Though informative, decolonial scholars have underscored the importance of contextualizing adverse mental health, particularly to explicitly link individual outcomes to the broader oppressive systems that produce them. For this article, I conducted a critical discourse analysis of 51 peer-reviewed journal articles to determine the extent to which social science researchers contextualize enforcement and its impacts, and to consider the implications of these efforts for how this problem is understood. I present four major tendencies of this sample: (1) the emphasis on contemporary U.S. politics, (2) the limited engagement with the topic of race and racism, (3) the weight it places on health risk, and (4) the use of diagnostic instruments and other measures. I argue that these tendencies work in tandem to portray immigration enforcement as a "colorblind" product of U.S. contemporary politics and construct a "Latinx" immigrant health crisis. This narrowly circumscribes the racialized, gendered, and classed effects of borders and reinscribes Otherness to the affected communities. Future research should leverage critical border scholarship to radically contextualize the immigration enforcement problem.
The purpose of this participatory action, mixed methods research study was to identify motivations related to firearm carrying from a qualitative perspective, and then to use quantitative research to characterize the patterns of motivations around carrying. Qualitative interview participants were 249 individuals aged 13 to 86 (68% male; 52% Black). About 52% identified as firearm owners; 48% lived in a high-violence area. A nationally representative sample of 1674 adults (50% female; Mage = 48 years old; 61.4% White; 39% household firearm owners) and a sample of 834 youth in the Southeastern United States (53% male; Mage = 16 years old; 46% White) participated in surveys. Qualitative reasons for carrying included protection for self or others, exercising rights, carrying as default, and carrying in perceived unsafe situations. Reasons for not carrying included general lack of need to carry; belief that guns increase risk; external regulation; and discomfort with guns. Latent class analysis of adults and youth indicated distinct patterns of motivations for carrying and not carrying, with a Rights & Protection class carrying at the highest frequency. Multisystemic prevention programs may leverage existing motivations against carrying and address motivations for carrying in order to reduce risky carrying.
Mixed evidence for the influence of structural and social factors on adolescent substance use behaviors exists across the rural-urban continuum. Therefore, this study explores how adolescent perceptions of structural and social community risk factors are associated with lifetime and past 30-day use of alcohol, marijuana, cigarettes, and illicit drugs among adolescents in different geographic locations. Data from 9819 adolescents from the 2019 Florida Youth Substance Abuse Survey were used to estimate associations between adolescent perceptions of community risk factors and lifetime and past 30-day alcohol, marijuana, cigarette, and illicit drugs using logistic regression models stratified by geographic location. Adolescent perceptions of community disorganization were significantly associated with lifetime and past 30-day alcohol use among town and rural adolescents and illicit drug use among adolescents from all geographic locations. Findings point to shared and unique risk and protective processes in geographic locations with implications for future research and community prevention efforts.
Abstract This article examines the psychological effects of migration detention in the European Union's Closed Controlled Access Center (CCAC) on Samos through an ecological lens. It explores a double normalization of suffering: the brutalization of necropolitical migration governance and the simultaneous understanding of resulting distress as an individual pathology. The mixed‐methods approach included measures of psychological distress (HSCL‐25, HTQ‐R; n = 7) and semi‐standardized interviews based on the Torturing Environment Scale (TES; N = 18). Data triangulation mapped the interaction between communal, organizational, and (inter)personal levels. Quantitative results highlighted extreme levels of distress (100% of participants above clinical cut‐offs), with depression strongly correlating with detention duration. However, triangulation with qualitative testimonies demonstrates that suffering is ecologically manufactured: The CCAC's institutional psycho‐medical and humanitarian uncare produce this distress rather than merely failing to alleviate it. The study emphasizes that the CCAC functions as a pathogenic torturing environment designed to debilitate. Recognizing the observed symptoms as symptoms of the system itself, this paper argues for a shift from diagnosing the individual to diagnosing the pathological system—a shift that, from a liberation psychology perspective, demands nothing less than the abolition of the camp.
Abstract The need for high‐quality social connection is central to community well‐being, yet foundational constructs like belongingness may not fully capture the dynamics of empowerment, justice, and social significance. This paper advances a theoretical framework positing that a sense of mattering—the feeling of being valued and capable of adding value—is a critical conceptual tool for community psychology. We argue that mattering evolves from belongingness by incorporating a prosocial agentic dimension (i.e., adding value) that explicitly links social connection to generativity and contributive justice. Adopting an ecological perspective, we reframe the lack of mattering not as an individual deficit but as a failure of settings to provide the opportunity role structures necessary for contribution. This distinction provides a structural basis for designing community‐based interventions that move beyond inclusion to cultivate genuine significance. Ultimately, this framework repositions mattering as a mechanism for systemic change, asserting that the opportunity to contribute is a matter of social justice.
There is an ongoing debate on the blurred lines of solidarity, inspired by a surge in solidarity collectives that accompany people on the move in Europe, in the aftermath of the so-called "refugee crisis" of 2015. Realizing that people racialized as migrants and refugees have been systematically objectified, either as "criminals" or "helpless victims" by the border regime, grassroots supporting people on the move experimented with more contentious and horizontal forms of solidarity. But how far did they actually go, to challenge the hierarchies of deservingness produced by increasingly harsh migration policies and border violences? Trying to shed light on some of the transformations and pitfalls that have impacted solidarity collectives, over time, I look back into my PhD fieldwork-a multi-sited ethnographic study, to revise its reflections on collective resistance. I argue that, over time, collectives are prone to struggle with conflict and friction, attempts of subalternization and co-optation, demanding new strategies of autonomy and political agency. These reflections aim to contribute to community psychology scholarship interested in studying the transgressive power of solidarity and allyship, which have the potential to regulate community resistance and power in hostile sociopolitical contexts.
US universities are built on stolen land and sustained through hierarchies of power that produce what migrant justice scholars name as b/order regimes. As institutions that claim to be sites of learning and inclusion, universities are fraught with contradictions as simultaneously sites of dispossession, exclusion, and control. To resist institutional violence, counterspaces emerge as fragile yet powerful sites where freedom dreaming is possible. Drawing from a migrant justice framework, we examine how counterspaces navigate and contest the neocoloniality of the university while creating alternative possibilities for belonging and collective care. Through a critically reflexive praxis, in this article, we grapple with these tensions that entangle us given our positionalities as faculty. We ask: How do we resist institutional violence and b/order regimes within the university to embody migrant justice? We engage this question through two case studies: the Cultural Identity Project, an Alaska Native Elder- and student-centered space for identity affirmation and belonging, and the Undocumented Students & Allies Association, a student-led space for solidarity and resistance. We illuminate how these counterspaces reveal the power of collective freedom dreaming while also being contained and co-opted by power. We argue that freedom dreaming deepens our praxis toward liberation and transformative futures.
Longer-duration, holistic, cohort-based, coach-led interventions may be particularly effective in promoting both economic health and emotional well-being among unmarried mothers living in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Aligning with the 1999 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) framework for program evaluation, this study presents a non-random pragmatic feasibility trial of Moms Moving Forward (MMF), a 12-month, community-centered, place-based initiative. MMF aims to improve financial stability and maternal mental health by building life skills and strengthening participants' sense of community and spirituality through personalized coaching, targeted workshops with local partners, and sisterhood-building activities. One hundred mothers across six cohorts enrolled in MMF over 3 years, of whom 72 completed the program. Participants provided pre- and post-self-report measures of demographics, financial health (credit scores, wages), mental health (anxiety, depression, stress, self-esteem), and desired and obtained life skills. A holistic indicator of progress was captured using the 2016 EMPath Bridge to Self-Sufficiency®, with scores self-determined alongside life coaches. Results indicated improvements in credit scores, wages, and advancement across all Bridge domains, alongside reductions in depression, anxiety, and stress. Participants reported increased life skills and high program acceptability. Continued evaluation using rigorous designs will be critical to assess efficacy and support future scaling.
Understanding and supporting social network growth among forcibly displaced people is vital as they rebuild their lives. This study examined data from a randomized controlled trial of the Refugee Well-being Project (RWP), a 6-month community-based intervention involving university students and refugees working together to reduce psychological distress and expand social networks. Multilevel growth curve analyses were conducted across four time points over 12 months among 290 recently resettled Afghan, Great Lakes African, Iraqi, and Syrian refugees in the United States. Results showed that intervention participants experienced short-term increases in social network size, peaking mid-intervention and declining by the 6-month follow-up. Although these positive effects were not sustained, control group participants experienced a steady decline in the size of their social networks over time, further highlighting the beneficial impacts of the RWP intervention. Findings suggest that university-community partnerships like RWP can temporarily boost social networks among refugees, offering insights for global resettlement support programs.
Disability is rarely acknowledged in scholarship on refugees and asylum-seekers, despite the trauma of fleeing conflict, migration's impact on physical and mental health, and the stigma that accompanies the way refugees and asylum-seekers (disabled or not) are expected to be self-sufficient. Like disabled communities, asylum-seekers are often framed as social burdens, valued for their potential economic contributions. This study applies Bérubé's concept of narrative deployments of disability and the frameworks of ablenationalism and debility to ask how public perceptions of Central American asylum seekers in the United States are shaped by neoliberal-ableist logics, and how the ideology of ability undergirds systems of inequality even in the absence of an explicitly disabled figure. To address these, we draw on open-ended survey data from a politically diverse US sample (N = 270), analyzing responses about resource allocation for refugees using qualitative abductive analysis. Findings show that perceptions of asylum-seekers reproduce compulsory able-bodiedness, reinforcing economic productivity as a prerequisite for citizenship. This aligns with historical trends in which disability metaphors have shaped im/migration policies to restrict access to rights. By centering disability, we argue that ablenationalism operates alongside racialized political economies to uphold borders, both material and social.
Depression is a leading global mental health issue, and social determinants of health (SDOH) influence its onset and progression. The role of neighborhood-level social vulnerability index (SVI), a comprehensive measure encompassing multiple SDOH indicators, in depression prevalence remains uncertain. Utilizing data from the US CDC, we employed mixed-effects linear regression models to explore this association and applied LASSO regression to analyze the relative importance of SVI domains and indicators Our analysis revealed that neighborhoods with higher SVI exhibited a significantly higher prevalence of depression, with an adjusted beta of 2.625 (95% CI: 2.518, 2.724) for continuous SVI, and the prevalence increased progressively from the second to the fourth SVI quartile (p for trend <0.001) Among all domains, race & ethnicity status (β = -9.090) and socioeconomic status (β = 8.252) demonstrated the strongest associations with depression prevalence, and we also observed a significant interaction between environmental burden and SVI (p for interaction <0.001). These findings indicate that higher SVI is associated with higher depression prevalence, with racial & minority and socioeconomic statuses emerging as key drivers of this relationship.
Immigrants' involvement in crime has been extensively assessed, yet far less attention has been given to their experiences as victims. This study centers on the voices of immigrants to examine their experiences with victimization. Drawing from a larger multimethod study, we analyze qualitative narrative responses from 56 Latin American immigrants. Of the participants interviewed (63% women, age range 18-68), 29 had permanent or temporary resident status, and 27 were undocumented (average 20.4 years in the United States). Our results identified four themes: experiences with violent victimization, gender-based violence, labor exploitation, and escalated police interactions. Our findings reveal that many participants did not initially recognize their experiences as victimization, instead normalizing exposure to violence, exploitation, and institutional harm. Gender-based violence was prevalent, with survivors often silenced by threats of deportation and limited knowledge of legal protections. Labor exploitation emerged as a routine form of abuse, compounded by legal precarity and fear of retaliation. Notably, police interactions were frequently described as traumatic, further eroding trust in formal systems. These results highlight the urgent need for trauma-informed, culturally responsive, and immigration-sensitive services that address both the direct and structural forms of victimization undocumented immigrants face. Implications for policy, community practice, and future research are discussed.
