Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2003:54:427-59.
doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.54.101601.145052. Epub 2002 Jun 10.

Community contexts of human welfare

Affiliations
Review

Community contexts of human welfare

Marybeth Shinn et al. Annu Rev Psychol. 2003.

Abstract

This chapter identifies "context minimization error" as the tendency to ignore the impact of enduring neighborhood and community contexts on human behavior. The error has adverse consequences for understanding psychological processes and efforts at social change. The chapter describes a series of theoretical models of how neighborhoods and community settings are associated with various aspects of human welfare and reviews evidence of associations of contexts with health, psychological distress, risky behaviors, psychological attitudes, and child development. It suggests that many psychological processes may play out differently in different contexts and that contextual factors interact with sociocultural characteristics of individuals in predicting outcomes. People, in turn, can shape community contexts. A more sophisticated understanding of the effects of contexts depends on more sophisticated approaches to assessing them.

PubMed Disclaimer

Similar articles

Cited by

LinkOut - more resources