Ramificações da psicologia social: perspectivas da atuação comunitária

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to reflect on the psychologists interference in communities and the results of this practice. The data used to reach this aim were theses, dissertations and experiences which describe the several types of community work within the lovler classes. It is then a kind af systematization of researches and preceding pratice, where theoretical-methodological questions are identified and debated, emerging as a consequence, a new type of psychology which is being called Community Psychology. The main basis of the method is the content analysis through which it was discovered how a psychologist acts when he decides to work in communities and what the results of this action are. In this context it was found out that the Comunity Psychology does not present one and only identity and this lack of definition is not the result of a deficiency, but a characteristic of this kind of Psychology. However, as paradoxal as it may look, the work leads to different definitioni of this type of Psychology. Concluding, we should say that the development of the research has revealed a controversy: Is there a Community Psychology or is it only a practical side of the Social Psychology? In obter words, what is different in the workof this psychologist in the community to justify the emergence of a new division af the Psychology? Such questíons focused on the polítical role of the psychologist who, working in the communities, dared to develop a kind of pratice ideologically engaged in social changes