Growing homelessness inAotearoa New Zealand stems primarily from rising inequalities and poverty. Drawing from scholarship on relational ethics, principled practice and Māori cultural concepts, this paper offers our reflections on nearly two decades of collective work to document and address homelessness. Central to the approach outlined are enduring community partnerships, the cultivation of reciprocal relations, and time spent with homeless people and those trying to work with them. We present exemplars for how we draw on everyday interactions with homeless people and agency staff to enhance local service and broader systemic responses to homelessness.
In psychology, where a natural science epistemology holds sway, relationships between the researcher and the researched are usually hierarchical and transactional, bound in procedural and legal ethics. This limited view of ethics fails to account for issues of power and privilege, as well as inequalities in economic and sociocultural structures. We argue for a more complete philosophy of science (and practice) consisting of complementary first principles—relational ethics and epistemology. Valuing relational ethics as a first principle means that how knowledge is produced and acted on is complementary in importance with what knowledge is produced. Collaborative relationships grounded in sincerity, reciprocity, and shared purpose become the basis for how psychological knowledge is produced, disseminated, and acted upon. We present two case studies to show how taking action in an ethical manner through relationships formed in the process of doing psychology deepens our conception and practice of psychology as human science.
Concerns regarding human security arguably define the contemporary world. Such concerns relate to the human desire to live with "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear" (United Nations System Task Team, 2012). There are significant challenges for contemporary human security that have emerged with processes of globalization, climate change, migration, population growth, violent extremism, transnational crime, constantly developing technologies, poverty, and inequality. More than ever perhaps, it is essential to consider the importance of economics, livelihoods, ecology, health, politics, and society when we seek to better understand human security. However, the dominant focus in psychology has remained relatively fixed on individual needs, perspectives, and experiences.Security has long been an object of study within the discipline of psychology. With notable exceptions related to issues of the environment, culture, and society that appear in this special section, our disciplinary approaches have tended to approach security rather narrowly as an individualized process. As a discipline, we have primarily focused on understanding and supporting secure minds, thoughts, emotions, and identities, in essence a stable selfhood that grows in a stable or secure personal environment. Beginning with a North American humanistic perspective, security was initially theorized in psychology as requiring a blending of fundamental needs as well as personality development to create different levels of secure personhood (Maslow, 1942). Psychoanalytic thinkers have posited relational attachments as central to developing the psychic organization needed for this secure sense of self (Ainsworth & Ainsworth, 1958;Bowlby, 1958;Fairbarin, 1952;Klein, 1927). Primarily, it was considered that successful emotional and social development results from positive attachment experiences in both childhood and adulthood.This notion of the secure personhood has permeated other nation states beyond the United States and Europe, where the focus has tended to remain on individualistic aspects of personal security. As such, cross-cultural psychologists have also considered security in terms of people's internal psychological processes through attention on developmental perspectives (Mesman, van Ijzendoorn, & Sagi-Schwartz, 2016), psychological needs (Malka, Soto, Inzlicht, & Lelkes, 2014), and moral values (Schwartz, 2012.
Research has shown that the gender transition of one partner in a relationship can have a significant impact on the non-transitioning partner. This paper explores the experiences of former and current cisgender partners of people making a gender transition. Six participants were recruited via snowball sampling and took part in semi-structured interviews, which were transcribed and analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Three superordinate themes were identified, namely: (1) the shared and ongoing process of learning about a partner's transgender identity; (2) changes in relationships; and (3) impact on self and identity. Findings highlight the constructed nature of gender and sexual identities, and the fluidity with which partners experienced these aspects of their lives. Future research could usefully explore the support needs of partners of transitioning people and the best ways to access and distribute this support.
Since its inception as a modern and evolving discipline, psychology has been concerned with issues of human security. This think piece offers an initial conceptualisation of human security as a broad security concept that encompasses a range of interrelated dimensions that have been responded to by different sub-disciplinary domains within psychology. We advance an argument for a human security psychology as a connecting focal point for general psychology that enables us to bring knowledge from across our eclectic discipline into further dialogue. This is a necessary step in understanding better the state of current thinking on the psychology of security and as a basis for informing further theory, research and practice efforts to address issues of human (in)security. This initial effort is informed by Assemblage Theory, which offers a dynamic and contextually rich perspective on people as agentive beings entangled within evolving natural and social formations that can foster or undermine their experiences of [in]security. The article is completed with a brief agenda for advancing human security psychology.
Building on the U.N. human security taxonomy of 1994, this article aims to explore the constructability of a reliable, valid, parsimonious, useful measure of human security that is relevant to contemporary environments and situations? A seminal 1994 U.N. report, Human Security in Theory and Practice, outlined seven types of human security (personal, health, food, community, economic, environmental, political). A quarter-century on, we added two more, cyber and national security, and tested if a single measure could capture all nine security concerns. A national sample of N = 1033 New Zealanders completed a brief online measure in which participants reported yes or no to experiencing each type of security and basic demographics. Guttman scaling placed these needs in an ascending order of difficulty. Analogous to a staircase, security may be scaled from personal up to political security (coefficient of reproducibility = .88), with three distinct but interrelated flights:(1) proximal (personal, health, food security); (2) social (cyber, community, economic, environmental); and (3) distal (national, political). We confirmed this nine-step, three-flight measure in our sample (Χ 2 = 81.72; df = 24; RMSEA = .048, 90%CI [.037, .06]; CFI = .976; TLI = .964; SRMR = .028). The measure showed configural, metric, scalar, and factorial invariances (across random-split subgroups). Ethnic groups and the precariously employed scored significantly differently, in coherent ways, on the security staircase scale.
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