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PATRICK O'NEILL
Acadia University
Abstract
The way we look at problems affects how we study them and try to solve them. Different interventions become salient depending on whether we focus on individuals perceived to have the problem, on the social setting that fosters it, or on an interaction of the two. As psychologists, our training is conducive to thinking on the individual rather than on the system level. When we employ research strategies that personalize the political, we risk being complicit with conservative political agendas that avoid social change by focusing on individual dysfunction. Even community psychologists, despite dealing in system-level theories, too often transform these into individual-level research. I will use, as examples, poverty, drugs, homelessness, resilience, and empowerment. I argue that since our research can provide a justification for either changing or maintaining the status quo, it has ethical implications.
The way we look at problems affects how we study them and try to solve them. Different interventions become salient depending on whether we focus on individuals perceived to have the problem, on the social setting that fosters it, or on an interaction of the two.
The abandonment of so-called wars on poverty in the U.S. and Canada shows how redefining problems can avert our gaze from systemic issues. In the U.S., the "war on poverty" became a "war on drugs" with consequent redirection of attention and resources. A parallel in Canada is the forsaking of Jean Chrctien's pledge to end child poverty and its replacement by Paul Martin's throne-speech promise to protect children from sexual exploitation. The personification of a social problem as the work of specific evil-doers shifts our attention away from the structures that maintain the status quo with all its inequities.
As psychologists, our training is conducive to thinking on the individual rather than on the systemic level. Even in community psychology, theories about settings too often become translated into research on individual differences. To the extent that psychologists become trapped in the discipline's conceptual traditions, they run the risk of advancing agendas antithetical to social change.
Edward Sampson (1983) has pointed out that psychology has a tendency to reduce complex phenomena to individual dynamics. He says:
Effort is expended in developing precise ways to measure and assess individual...