Understanding Social Intervention and Community Involvement

Posted on Apr 6, 2025 in Social sciences

Social Intervention and Community Involvement

Community involvement emphasizes aspects of the interventive process or goal.

Aspects:

  1. Comprehensive human development and reducing psychosocial problems.
  2. Sense of belonging and community.
  3. Personal empowerment, self-direction, and meso-social development.

Distinguishing Characteristics:

  1. Object/Recipient of intervention.
  2. Assumed role.
  3. Initial rate of change.
  4. Objectives/Goals.
  5. Field of application.
  6. Techniques and strategies used.
  7. Duration.
  8. Relational style/format.
  9. Measurement principle of organization.

Process, Services, and Resources (CI):

  1. Initial Evaluation: Needs assessment (problem), resource identification, and program evaluation.
  2. Design/Planning and Organizing Phases:
    1. Determination of values and goals with ethical and political principles.
    2. Components, shares, or resources.
    3. Getting resource strategies.
  3. Implementation: Realize the planned activities and correct deficiencies (through feedback):
    1. Entry into the community, linked to or simultaneous with the negotiation of the contract.
    2. Maintaining the program, securing funding sources, personnel, etc.
  4. Intervention Evaluation
  5. Dissemination of Interventional Programs: Broadcast programs.

Classification of Intervention Strategies:

A. Rappaport Classification Levels: Individual, small group, organization, and community.

  1. Focus on the Individual: Eliminates deficits to increase social competence and clinical adaptability. Methods include crisis intervention, brief therapy, training, individual education, and individual consultation.
  2. Small Groups: Assumes social problems are caused not by individuals but by obstacles (conflict, poor communication or interaction) or interpersonal relations between them. Intervention would be made through techniques such as family or relational therapy, or group work.
  3. Organization: Addresses the inability of organizations to provide services and transmit values and social norms. Solutions include strategies for change and organizational development, organizational consulting, management improvement, and productive communication of results.
  4. Institutions and the Community: Addresses problems in the ideology and social policy that governs them. The basic variable is the unequal distribution of power. Strategies of social protection and community organization.

Classified by Object or Functions:

  1. Provision of human or personal services.
  2. Human resource development.
  3. Prevention in its three variants.
  4. Community social reconstruction and social and community intervention genuinely seeking.
  5. Social change or reform of the existing social system.
  6. Those that attempt to create new systems or social institutions.
  7. Modification of existing social systems.
    1. Development of community and social action.
    2. Attempts to reform social protection of certain aspects and processes.

Alternatives to Traditional Clinical Services:

  1. Crisis Intervention
  2. Brief Therapies
  3. Reviews

Types of Crises:

  • Unexpected, accidental, or traumatic.
  • Expected, evolutionary, or maturational.

Intervention Techniques (ICTB):

  1. Theme Focus: The stressor, its mode of action, and effects.
  2. Use of Time: As a therapeutic factor, number of sessions, scheduling.
  3. Activity and Directivity: Motor therapeutic: disorganized states against the therapeutic relationship.
  4. Technical Flexibility

ICTB Criticism: Does significant contributions to changing socio-environmental conditions the bulk of work in crisis repair of a clinical nature, though in a more social and community context.

Consultation: Definition and Characteristics

The client may be an individual program.

  1. It is a triadic relation, not dyadic.
  2. The problems addressed are not only mental health related.
  3. It occurs in the natural environment.
  4. It tries changing the situation or social context of the client system, not only solving the specific problem.
  5. It establishes a cooperative relationship of mutual trust and co-ordination.
  6. The information shared is confidential.

Consultation Process:

  1. Entrance
  2. Negotiation of the contract and establishment of the relationship linked to the initial contact.
  3. Evaluation system and definition of the problem.
  4. Intervention. Layout plan.
  5. Intervention Termination.