Increasing students' perceived sociopolitical empowerment through online and face‐to‐face community psychology seminars

Abstract

Community psychology theorists underline the importance of promoting sociopolitical empowerment, but few studies have been conducted on the evaluation of the efficacy of empowering programs among university students. The authors report two studies: the first, with 216 psychology majors, compared the efficacy of face-to-face and online community psychology seminars in promoting perceived sociopolitical empowerment and self efficacy. The second, with 170 psychology majors, explored if differences in teachers experiences affected students sociopolitical empowerment. Results of ANOVA, on measures of empowerment and self-efficacy, indicate that learning community psychology principles and a community analysis skill did increase sociopolitical empowerment and efficacies in all studies, both in online and face-to-face settings, regardless of teachers' experience. Implications for promoting active citizenship and attracting more students to community psychology programs are discussed. C 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Positive Predictors of Career Adaptability Among Diverse Community College Students

“…One method for doing so may be to develop empirically-based interventions aimed at increasing students’ self-efficacy beliefs, particularly around their perceived ability to overcome or adapt to environmental barriers. For example, previous research has documented the effectiveness of first-year seminars in bolstering the academic self-efficacy of college students (Francescato et al, 2009). Thus, first-year seminars may be one viable medium for building the self-efficacy of community college students faced with environmental barriers.…”

Understanding the Career Aspirations of Diverse Community College Students

“…For example, skills-based interventions and interest inventories could be implemented by career counselors to increase students’ career knowledge and their confidence in academic skills. Additionally, first year-seminars are of potential use for this goal and have been shown to have positive impacts on college students’ academic self-efficacy (Francescato, Solimeno, Mebane, & Tomai, 2009). Moreover, these self-efficacy building activities may help students feel empowered to continue their education in ways that will be most effective for their long-term career goals (i.e., potentially transferring to a 4-year institution or pursuing a graduate degree).…”

Strengthening community psychology in Europe through increasing professional competencies for the new Territorial Community Psychologists

“…Finally, they select priorities for personal change that they can manage on their own. For desired collective changes, participants identify other people, groups, and/or institutions with which they may network to achieve these wider goals (Francescato et al, 2009, Francescato & Zani 2013 These empowerment methodologies could be very useful for territorial community psychologists who are asked to develop specific empowerment training programs for groups of citizens such as migrants, women, children, youth, and older people. Combining some of these methodologies, such as community profiling, PMOA and sociopolitical empowerment training, can give a strong contribution to the goal of "promoting the full and harmonic development of the individual in family, work, friendship, free time, associative and community contexts" as the Campania law codifies.…”