Ecological theory in practice: illustrations from a community-based intervention to promote the health of recent mothers

Abstract

We present a qualitative case study where we used four principles of ecological theory from community psychology as a template to assess the dynamics about how a preventive community intervention was transacted in eight communities in Victoria, Australia. The principles were cycling of resources, interdependence, adaptation, and succession. Ecological thinking focuses on key resources in communities. That is, the people, events, and settings that are the foundations of thinking about communities as systems. The data set consists of field diaries kept by and serial interviews with nine community development workers over a 2-year period. We found that the analysis highlighted a process-oriented way of representing the intervention, one that sees beyond the intervention's technical components (or packaged elements) to the complexities of the cultural and political change processes occurring beneath. The value of this is the attention focussed on likely project sustainability.