Empowering Settings and Voices for Social Change combines a focus on understanding social settings as loci for empowering intervention with a focus on understanding and giving voice to citizens. The volume illuminates advances in theory and method relevant to changing a broad spectrum of social settings (including programs, organizations, institutions, communities and social policy) from a strengths-based perspective. Three cross-cutting concepts -- a strengths-based approach to research and social action, empowerment, and narrative research methods -- serve as integrating and foundational themes.
Part I takes up issues of setting processes and outcomes of influence, research methods, and implications for setting and community change efforts and social policy. Questions addressed in Part I include: What is the nature of current and future conceptualizations of social settings? What are the actionable features in social settings? How can settings that place a premium on empowerment and promotion be created or restructured? What are the organizational characteristics of empowering community settings? What mechanisms mediate the impact of these characteristics on individual well-being?
Part II examines how action scientists have sought to understand and amplify the voices of those individuals and communities who serve as the focus of their research and social change actions. Part II authors explore the role of institutional beliefs, community narratives, and personal stories in recovery from serious mental illness; trace the cultural contours of "mental health" among the Gros Ventres of the Fort Belknap Indian reservation; examine youth voice in the juvenile justice system, illuminating the loss of focus on individualized justice and accountability to youth; and, outline ways in which community narrative can enrich culturally anchored work in prevention and public policy. Finally, chapters in Part III seek to situate the rest of the volume's chapters in the context of decades of work on empowering settings, giving voice and social change.

This comprehensive handbook, the first in its field, brings together 106 different contributors. The 38 interrelated but at the same time independent chapters discuss key areas including conceptual frameworks; empirically grounded constructs; intervention strategies and tactics; social systems; designs, assessment, and analysis; cross-cutting professional issues; and contemporary intersections with related fields such as violence prevention and HIV/AIDS.

Within the field of psychology, community psychology specifically challenges traditional ways of thinking by considering people as embedded in ecological systems. It also recognizes that the links between persons and settings may be as important as either factor alone. Many of the important writings in this field have been presented in the American Journal of Community Psychology, as such, theintellectual history of community psychology has been presented in this journal.

During the past quarter century, community psychologists have worked to make relevant contributions to human welfare in community settings and to effect social change. Working with and in schools, neighborhood organizations, religious institutions, social programs, and government agencies, the community psychologist has come to understand how social settings and social policy influence behavior and foster change that promotes individual health and well-being. Using a social ecological paradigm as their guiding framework, they focus on the interactions between persons and their environments, cultural diversity, and local empowerment for understanding organizational, community, and social change.

Community psychologists have relied on multiple methods of obtaining data but more often, they have had to develop new methodologies or adapt existing ones. These innovative methods have been recorded in the American Journal of Community Psychology throughout the years of its history and have changed the way that researchers in the field have gathered data. Some of the areas covered in this volume include:

- intervention;
- prevention research;
- ecological assessment; and
- culturally anchored research. This volume will be of interest to community, developmental, social and clinical psychologists, public health and behavioral medicine researchers, cultural intervention researchers, and community mental health and health workers.

During the past quarter century, community psychologists have worked to make relevant contributions to human welfare in community settings and to effect social change. Working with and in schools, neighborhood organizations, religious institutions, social programs, and government agencies, the community psychologist has come to understand how social settings and social policy influence behavior and foster change that promotes individual health and well-being. Using a social ecological paradigm as their guiding framework, they focus on the interactions between persons and their environments, cultural diversity, and local empowerment for understanding organizational, community, and social change.

Community psychologists have relied on multiple methods of obtaining data but more often, they have had to develop new methodologies or adapt existing ones. These innovative methods have been recorded in the American Journal of Community Psychology throughout the years of its history and have changed the way that researchers in the field have gathered data.

This work contains original research from the first 25 years of the American Journal of Community Psychology, selected to reflect community psychology's rich tradition of theory, empirical research, action, and innovative methods. This volume will be of interest to community mental health workers, social science and social work researchers, health care professionals, policymakers, and educators in the fields of community and preventative psychology.