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. 2023 Sep 28;20(19):6856.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph20196856.

The Integration of Social Science for Community Engagement in the Humanitarian Fields of Conflicts and Disasters: A Scoping Review

Luisa Toro-Alzate  1 , Paola Maffi  2 , Anu Puri  3 , Rania Elessawi  4 , Maria Falero Cusano  4 , Jozefien Groenendijk  2 , Daniel H de Vries  1   5
Affiliations

The Integration of Social Science for Community Engagement in the Humanitarian Fields of Conflicts and Disasters: A Scoping Review

Luisa Toro-Alzate et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

Community engagement (CE) is essential to humanitarian assistance, and the social sciences have been credited in recent epidemics and disease outbreaks as having played a crucial, supportive role. Broadening this attention to other humanitarian fields, this scoping review asks what lessons learned can be found in grey and peer-reviewed literature on the integration of the social sciences in CE for conflicts and disasters. Using an analytical framework developed through a UNICEF-led project called Social Science for Community Engagement (SS4CE) in Humanitarian Action, we identified 1093 peer reviewed publications and 315 grey literature reports of possible relevance. The results show that only a small minority-18 publications and 4 reports-tangibly comment on the relevance of social sciences, mostly only in passing and implicitly. While social science techniques are used and the importance of understanding a community's cultural, linguistic, and religious context is emphasized, further discussion on the integration of transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary social sciences is absent. Furthermore, CE is mostly seen as an instrumental ('means to an end') involvement, for example to collect data in emergency situations and receive feedback on interventions, but not as a critical and transformative intervention. We conclude that unlike the attention given to social sciences in disease outbreaks, there is a knowledge gap and an accordingly proper planning and implementation gap regarding the potentiality of social science to improve CE across all humanitarian contexts of disasters and conflicts.

Keywords: community engagement; conflict; disasters; hazards; humanitarian action; social sciences.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funder had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript; or in the decision to publish the results.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
PRISMA flowchart of published and grey literature (numbers in red belong to grey literature) PR: peer-review literature, GL: grey literature.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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