Ecological Theory 439had been that the scales were truly reflective of setting mem-
bers’ ratings of satisfaction with the setting rather than actual
characteristics of the setting (see Linney, 2000, for a more
detailed discussion).
As the field matured into the 1980s, community psycholo-
gists began to advocate for the development of more methods
that would assess the environment at an extra-individual level
(Seidman, 1988; Shinn, 1990) and have devoted conferences,
such as the 1988 Chicago Conference, to issues of theories and
methods within the community psychology framework. At
this conference, particularly notable was Edward Seidman’s
discussion of “social regularities,” a theoretical construct that
attended to the variation of individual behavior across con-
texts and over time (Linney, 1986; Seidman, 1988, 1990).
Furthering the theories established by the ecological
framework, which highlight communities and their strengths,
Chavis & Wandersman (1990) discussed improving the fit
between people and their communities. Instead of focusing
on the “people” part of the equation, they focused on the
communities: “Strengthening the ability of these institu-
tions to live up to the dreams of their members must be our
goal” (Chavis, 1993, p. 172). Whitman, White, O’Mara, and
Goeke-Morey (1999) also studied how the environment can
assist in or detract from the development of infants. Contra-
dicting previous assumptions that these infants were unaf-
fected by their surroundings, they showed how to build on
existing environmental resources to positively impact their
development. Identifying environmental resources and how
they may contribute to this positive development continues to
be an important goal for community psychologists.
Tensions around the Need to Address Diversity
in Ecological Research
In addition to assessing environments, both physical and
psychological, community psychologists have also sought to
integrate ecological theory into research through the study of
culture. Steele, Trickett, and Labarta (1981) suggested that a
focus on culture is congruent with an ecological approach
because “attention paid to the interaction of person and envi-
ronment, provides a framework from which to examine the
functional aspects of behaviors and structures in culturally
diverse environments” (p. 5). This line of inquiry seeks to
contextualize knowledge of individual behavior.
As yet, community psychology as a discipline has not made
substantial progress to understand social problems in the con-
text of cultural norms and values. Community psychologists
are part of a larger context of psychologists that have long
been criticized for not respecting diversity and viewing devia-
tions from white culture as problematic. Kingry-Westergaard
and Kelly (1990) argued that this disparity could be resolved if
community psychologists abandoned their positivist mind-
sets and attended to the varying realities in which people
live and behave. Echoing the contextualist framework
posited by Kingry-Westergaard and Kelly, Trickett, Watts,
and Birman (1994) suggested that the very reason that com-
munity psychology has not addressed issues related to diver-
sity is psychologists have been resistant to shifting their
paradigms to a more contextualist perspective. An example of
an exemplary recent effort is the work of Morris, Shinn, and
Dumont to identify contextual factors affecting the organiza-
tional commitment of diverse police officers. One of their
findings indicated that ethnicity and gender were important
factors in understanding police officers’ organizational com-
mitments (Morris, Shinn, & DuMont, 1999).
Congruent with the contextualist philosophy and ecologi-
cal theory, the use of qualitative methods in community psy-
chology research has gradually become more widespread. In
the early 1980s, with the work of Holahan and Moos (1982),
community psychologists were publishing qualitative work
in the field’s peer review journals (Cherniss, 1989; McGhee,
1984; Potasznik & Nelson, 1984). Methodologies that
most often require qualitative methods of analysis, such as
participant-observation and the use of narratives, have been
used to understand and describe social settings (Rappaport,
1995). In 1998, K. Miller and Banyard edited a special issue
of the American Journal of Community Psychology (AJCP)
dedicated to the use of qualitative methods and illustrated
the multiple ways nontraditional methods could be used in
the field’s efforts to contextualize our understanding of indi-
vidual behavior (K. Miller & Banyard, 1998). For example,
among these articles was one that focused on understanding
the educational achievement of young African American
men within their ecology, including familial, communal, and
cultural contexts (Maton, Hrabowski, & Greif, 1998). In ad-
dition, many contemporary community psychologists are
illustrating ways to approach the study of the person-in-
context through the use of both qualitative and quantitative
methods. The research of Rebecca Campbell (1998) is exem-
plary. She has sought to understand the relationships between
social system responses to rape survivors and the experiences
of the survivors through the integration of quantitative and
qualitative methods. As the field evolves into the twenty-first
century, multimethod approaches will hopefully become
more common as the field recognizes the extent to which the
context in which we collect information about individuals
and communities, including the methods used, influences our
findings and conclusions. Thus, opening up the methods tool-
box will undoubtedly broaden and deepen our understanding
of social phenomena.