Community psychology represents a new way of thinking about people’s behaviour and well-being in the context of all the community environments and social systems in which they live their lives. The extensiveness of community psychology, the number of contexts in which its principles can be applied and the range of skills needed for effective application is one of the formidable aspects of creating a comprehensible Value Intention. In uttering the competencies of a community psychologist, we are facing the reality that no graduate program can guarantee its students will possess all of these skills, as well as our knowledge that becoming a community psychologist is a developmental process.
But community is not the only field facing these concerns and there are some lessons to be learnt from school psychology and even clinical psychology. Both of these fields have masters and doctoral level programs and both prepare practitioners. Both have skill sets that are impossible to provide to students within a graduation time frame, especially at the masters level. They get around this by requiring certain sets of training activities but do not put themselves in a position to claim that their programs are imparting a list of competencies. Certainly, these fields have lists of competencies required by their profession, but they avoid saying that these are competencies possessed by every professional. Further, they recognize that if programs are asked to declare what they are expecting with regard to the long lists of competencies, the result will be that much of the “training” will be to a level of familiarity or being an “apprentice” and not to “competency.”
One solution that occurs is that the field of community psychology should strive to have master’s and doctoral programs talk about competency clusters, sets of skills that they emphasize and that become the “characteristic” of their graduates, while also ensuring that they impart to the students a...