Content uploaded by Kenneth Mcleroy
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Kenneth Mcleroy
Content may be subject to copyright.
Identifying and Defining the Dimensions of Community Capacity to Provide a Basis for Measurement
Abstract
Although community capacity is a central concern of community development experts, the concept requires clarification. Because of the potential importance of community capacity to health promotion, the Division of Chronic Disease Control and Community Intervention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), convened a symposium in December 1995 with the hope that a consensus might emerge regarding the dimensions that are integral to community capacity. This article describes the dimensions that the symposium participants suggested as central to the construct, including participation and leadership, skills, resources, social and interorganizational networks, sense of community, understanding of community history, community power, community values, and critical reflection. The dimensions are not exhaustive but may serve as a point of departure to extend and refine the construct and to operationalize ways to assess capacity in communities. Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67070/2/10.1177_109019819802500303.pdf
... Part of the challenge in all these approaches is the ambiguity surrounding what community capacities are and which ones should be prioritised. For example, some scholars view capacity broadly as a state of readiness (Goodman et al., 1998), while others see it as specific, existing assets and abilities within communities (OECD, 2011). Those existing assets and abilities have further been conceptualised as tangible and intangible assets, such as legal structures, equipment, personal skills, and knowledge (Ahmad & Abu Talib, 2016;Amadei, 2020). ...
... The photographs reveal subtle, yet significant interactions characterised by respect, generosity, and service (cf. Goodman et al., 1998) like filling all pots with water, sharing clotheslines, and communal washingthat foster community membership and fulfilment. Theoretically, these shared resources and associated selflessness are crucial in building a sense of community. ...
... It encompasses the interplay of human, organizational, and social capital, which should influence communities' ability and approaches to engage in local initiatives such as public health interventions [16]. In this context, community capacity considers the resources within communities that can be leveraged to initiate action and sustain efforts aimed at preventing diseases and promoting health [17,18]. Although the concept of community capacity has been discussed for some time, efforts to formalize it within the context of disease prevention and health promotion are relatively recent, as is the research focused on thoroughly examining its impact on community dynamics [19]. ...
... From its earliest conceptualizations, Sense of Community (SoC) has been consistently indicated as a core component of community capacity [17][18][19], as well as being one of the strongest predictors of the adoption of more evidence-based prevention strategies [20]. SoC is a multidimensional construct originating from the field of community psychology. ...
Background
The centrality of community engagement in disease prevention and health promotion interventions highlights the need to understand the contextual factors that shape participation. Sense of Community (SoC), characterized by feelings of belonging, connection, and interdependence among members of a community, has emerged as a key component of community capacity and is therefore expected to influence engagement outcomes. However, empirical evidence is needed to assess its actual impact on community engagement. Additionally, the literature lacks a broader synthesis of the role and implications of SoC in this context. This study aims to review the empirical literature on SoC in disease prevention and health promotion, with a special focus on its association with community engagement.
Methods
A scoping review was conducted following the PRISMA guidelines, searching for empirical studies published between 1974 and 2023 via Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed.
Results
Nineteen studies were included in the review, revealing three key themes: (1) the community to which SoC refers – among intervention participants, within community coalitions, and defined by the place of residence; (2) the interpretation of SoC, either as a generic, intuitive concept or as a theoretically defined construct; (3) the ways in which SoC is studied – as a predictor of engagement but also as an outcome of the interventions. Generic SoC among intervention participants emerged as a positive outcome and a factor contributing to engagement. However, as the scope expanded to encompass broader communities and SoC became more theoretically grounded, these dynamics shifted. SoC related to the place of residence did not exhibit significant improvement after interventions. Broader community-level SoC showed positive associations with engagement among members of community coalitions, but evidence was less consistent among the individuals targeted by interventions.
Conclusions
The review highlighted a scarcity of empirical research on SoC despite its recognition as a key component of community capacity. Contextualizing SoC is crucial, as its interpretation significantly influences its role in disease prevention and health promotion interventions. Further research is needed to clarify whether SoC can foster engagement at all community levels, especially among the general population. This is particularly relevant amid the current context of escalating health needs and strained traditional resources, where community engagement is increasingly essential to ensuring the sustainable delivery of disease prevention and health promotion efforts. If SoC can drive widespread engagement, it could play a pivotal role in building more proactive and autonomous health-promoting communities.
... Chaskin (2001) pointed out that in many studies on community capacity, the definition and measurement of community capacity have different emphases, but the common points include resources (personal skills of community members, organizational capabilities, ability to obtain external financial support, etc.), relationship networks (emotion/tools), leadership, and mechanisms to support community members to participate in collective action and solve problems. Furthermore, based on a systematic review of research on community capacity at home and abroad, it was found that resident relations, leadership, and resource integration are common elements recognized and used by more scholars (Gamo & Park, 2022;Glickman & Servon, 1998;Goodman, 1998;Huang, 2020;Labonte & Laverack, 2001;Taylor, 2011). Huang (2020) pointed out that governance rules in community capacity are also an important dimension that affects farmers' participation in human settlement governance. ...
Digital technology has emerged as a significant factor influencing farmers’ participation in human settlements governance, and it shows obvious community heterogeneity. The Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) theory illustrates that the performance of digital technology is not solely dependent on technical conditions, but also closely linked to the context in which it is implemented. This study incorporates digital technology and community capacity into a unified analytical framework. Utilizing data from a survey of 1,043 farmers, the Ordered Probit model was employed to empirically examine the influence of these two factors on farmers’ participation in human settlements governance. Additionally, the propensity score matching method (PSM), conditional mixed process method (CMP), and threshold effect model were utilized for robustness testing and further analysis. The results indicate that (1) Both digital technology and community capacity have significant positive effects on farmers’ participation, and the two have complementary effects. (2) The higher the community capacity (threshold value 0.682), the more obvious the positive impact of digital technology on farmers’ participation. (3) The impact of digital technology and community capacity on farmers’ participation is heterogeneous based on total income and regional distribution, showing that the two have significant impacts on the participation behavior of middle-income farmers and farmers in the central region respectively. Therefore, this paper proposes that it is crucial to harmonize the efficient utilization of digital technology with the strengthening of community capacity. Additionally, rural areas should adopt a tailored approach to managing their communities based on their unique characteristics.
... 52,53 Relationship-building is a key component in increasing a community's collective capacity to improve population health, including social determinants of health. [54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61] Partnership or collaboration can unite community resources for a common, shared purpose, such as better coordination of services, improved relationships, reduction in duplication of services/efforts, and merging and/or leveraging skills and resources of the collaborative group. 57,58,62-64 Healy discusses working from an asset-based approach for community development where change comes from within the community. ...
It is important to leverage the healthcare workforce in new and innovative ways, with more care taking place outside of traditional settings. Flexibility in the way individuals connect with and engage in care is critical. Relationships are central to the development, forward progress, and collective action of community-based partnerships and collaborations. Often, evaluation of partnerships or community collaborative efforts focuses on achieving outcomes and effectiveness; however, community capacity building has many dimensions including: skills and resources, nature of social relations, structures and mechanisms for community dialogue, civic participation, value systems, and learning culture. Continued expansion of telehealth as a means of healthcare provision means identifying evidence-based practices and policy changes to address challenges. There is a need to improve the quality and standardization of data to fully demonstrate and understand the impact of telehealth and identify where disparities persist. Telehealth plays a key role in helping to address workforce issues by enhancing access and reducing burnout.
A public health society working group wanted to use social marketing approaches to engage with a community and stimulate social support for a health treatment. The group struggled to collect effectiveness (summative) data during the project. To make up for this lack, the group explored ways to measure effectiveness of engagement (the primary outcome) based on written records (meeting minutes) kept during the project.
The working group kept minutes of meetings that contained records of the level of participation of members by names. The text of 18 meetings (14,000 words) was edited so that the names of participants were replaced with roles that corresponded to working group members’ roles: grassroots health advocates, community health agency representatives, and experts or knowledge leaders. The corpus was imported into a text analysis platform that measured word frequency. Results were tallied for the three categories of group member roles. To validate the method as a meaningful summative evaluation, the text analysis approach was critiqued using a developmental evaluation framework.
The text analysis evaluation indicated that the word frequency of “partner,” (community health partner), “community” (grassroots health advocates), and “expert” (or knowledge leaders) tags began to converge as the campaign progressed. Initially, experts and community health partners spoke less in meetings, and community members spoke more. Over time, all members began contributing more equally during the meetings. The checklist evaluation indicated alignment of the technique with established evaluation protocols used in the field of public health.
The text and checklist analyses support the notion that engagement among working group members may be, and thus may be seen as, a precondition of engagement with the community. When used with evidence from event evaluations, the innovation may be used as an argument for effectiveness as an outcome in community-based public health campaigns that do not use conventional project (summative) evaluations.
Crises are experienced locally in people’s own spatial and virtual social milieus. In each local context, the informational conditions for both short-term and long-term action are shaped by public and private sectors, but the use of social, physical, and digital infrastructure affecting information flows is essentially in the hands of the civil society, too. Using empirical findings from our case studies of community resilience in COVID-19 crisis in Helsinki, Finland, we discuss the significance of use of social media as a dispersed, yet collective informational capacity as part of emergency preparedness and operations. We argue that communicational agencies of people and communities and the resulting collective informational capacity, especially in the local settings, should be adopted and rooted to the concept of resilience, as well as to emergency preparedness and risk management of society.
To be resilient in the face of sudden and long-term crises, societies need the capacity to deal with various problems related to information. In an emergency, there is a need for quick sharing and correction of information. In the long run, the resilience of a society is bound up with informational conditions for collective change-making and adaptation to long-term system-level crises such as climate change.
Cattle farming is one of the main agricultural activities in Colombia, but its mainly extensive nature generates significant social and environmental impacts, such as land grabbing, agricultural frontier expansion, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and deforestation. To transform cattle systems towards sustainability, the Policy Guidelines for Sustainable Cattle 2022–2050 (LPGBS) were launched in 2022, resulting from conversations between sector institutions and the national government. Although the LPGBS are proposed as the roadmap for cattle farming in the coming decades, their implementation has faced delays and raised doubts among the involved institutions. This research analyzes the current state of the LPGBS to identify difficulties and determine strategies that promote sustainability in cattle systems by building capacities. The research is based on a mixed-methods approach and contains a literature review on the evaluation of public policies in the cattle sector, complemented by 26 key-informant interviews with experts from public and private institutions involved in developing the LPGBS. These interviews provided key perspectives and practical experiences to understand current difficulties in the implementation of the LPGBS and identify the capacities needed to achieve the planned transition to sustainable cattle farming. Results reveal several difficulties in the LPGBS design stage, including institutional weakness, low governmental participation, and lack of trust among stakeholders. However, important progress was made, such as the construction of social, environmental, and productive sustainability criteria, the consolidation of the sustainability approach at the cattle landscape level, and regional participation. The capacities necessary to drive the implementation of the LPGBS include strengthening rural extension programs, access to financing, and the implementation of a traceability system for monitoring and evaluation. These findings highlight the importance of evaluating policies at early stages to provide crucial information for decision-makers and public policy formulators to correct and improve implementation processes.
Zusammenfassung
Community Capacity gilt als bedeutsam für die Umsetzung effektiver kommunaler Prävention und Gesundheitsförderung (PGF). Der Artikel untersucht die Zusammenhänge zwischen Community Capacity, evidenzbasierten PGF-Strategien und dem Substanzkonsum von Jugendlichen. Höhere Capacity-Level sind mit höherer Wahrscheinlichkeit mit evidenzbasierter PGF und geringeren Prävalenzen von Substanzkonsum verbunden. Dies unterstreicht die Bedeutung von Capacity Building als Bestandteil von PGF-Strategien.
Addressing the needs of HIV vulnerable populations requires a multifaceted approach that incorporates inclusive strategy development to ensure effective and equitable care. This review examines how inclusive strategies can be pivotal in improving outcomes for these populations by integrating advanced technologies, such as big data and machine learning, to identify emerging trends and underserved subgroups. Strengthening partnerships with local organizations and community-based groups is essential for enhancing outreach and ensuring cultural relevance in interventions. The review also highlights the importance of investing in innovative models, such as digital health tools and telemedicine, to overcome traditional barriers to care. Furthermore, addressing social determinants of health is crucial for designing comprehensive interventions that tackle underlying factors affecting health outcomes. Promoting continuous feedback and improvement ensures that strategies remain responsive and effective. By employing these inclusive strategies, healthcare systems can better meet the diverse needs of HIV vulnerable populations and improve overall service delivery.
