Intersections of Competencies for Practice and Research in Community Psychology

Abstract

The Community Psychology Practice Competencies (Dalton & Wolfe, 2012) have helped the field of community psychology clarify the skills necessary to engage in community practice in our discipline and have begun to be used for designing curricula and other educational tools in community psychology training programs. Many community psychologists, however, combine elements of both practice and research in their work, and research skills are less represented in the practice competencies than other types of skills. Society for Community Research and Action’s Council on Education recently developed a set of Community Psychology Research Competencies to provide additional depth of understanding of the types of skills and knowledge associated with rigorous and impactful research in community psychology. This paper describes the research competencies and their development and considers them in the context of the existing practice competencies in the interests of expanding the understanding of how research and practice intersect in our training programs and our work in both academic and nonacademic settings. An action-research cycle model is presented to help explain how practice and research competencies complement one another and how both are informed by a common set of principles guiding all the activities of our field. Recommendations are then offered for integrating the research and practice competencies across practiceor research-focused training programs.