First published February 25, 2020
During my junior and senior years of high school, I was able to attend the community college in Wenatchee through the school’s running start program. I felt completely overwhelmed by the idea of finishing my associate’s degree and then trying to transfer to a university. “What should I major in? Should I do something I like or something for money? How will I do it without the support of my parents?” Despite doing exceedingly well in my studies the first year, I decided to drop out after only one year and decided to instead work full time for the religion that my parents raised me in, Jehovah’s Witnesses. At the time it felt like the “easier” path. When I was 25, however, I started to realize that I no longer believed in the teachings of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I re-enrolled in college to finish my associate’s degree. That same overwhelming feeling came back trying to decide what to do. I spent two more years bouncing between programs: online vs on campus, education or psychology, undergrad or all the way to a PhD. I eventually landed in Bothell, WA and enrolled at the satelite UW campus here, majoring in community psychology (CP). To my absolute relief, the first quarter at UW Bothell I took the principal class for the major and within a few weeks, I had a moment of realization that I had lucked into what I feel is my calling in life. This was, in no small part, due to the instruction of Dr. Eric Stewart.
I had a chance to sit down with Dr. Stewart to discuss the research that he does. Since I plan on getting into the same field of research, I thought it the perfect opportunity to pick his brain about community psychology. Upon entering his office, I was surprised to see him rocking out to alternative music. (I had never heard of the band he was listening to which is an oddity for me. Is Dr. Stewart cooler than me?!) I was taken aback by how clean yet oddly cluttered his office is. His desk is very minimal, with nothing more than his computer and whatever thing he is currently working on. Knick-knacks are kept to a minimum. However on the wall to the left are a few rows of shelves with papers, posters, books, and trinkets scattered everywhere with no obvious sense of organization. One side of the bookshelf has psychology textbooks lined up, the other has stacks of paper with things falling out. I wonder if his office reflects the controlled chaos that so very often is psychology research.
Community Psychology- The Study of People and their Culture
He begins by telling me that this is not a new experience for him; since BIS 312 is a required class for CP majors he finds that a lot of his current and former students look to him when it comes time to do this assignment. Before I could even ask questions he launched into telling me about how his work is very ethnographical. “That’s literally what the point of my assignment is!” I exclaimed to him. “Oh, wonderful,” he said, in his classic Dr. Stewart manner. It was almost as if he knew exactly what questions I was going to ask. I proceeded, however, unbothered by the fact that he probably has answered the exact same series of questions more times than he cares to admit.
I have to take a moment to remind myself not to presume anything. Since I have already taken his class and Dr. Stewart explained at length what his primary focus was, I felt it important to ask questions as if this was the first time I was learning about the field. Community psychology was an enigma to me until I took Dr. Stewart’s class last quarter, so I’m excited to approach it with new eyes. The basic premise behind it is that what we are doing as a society is making people crazy, so stop it. “What is the primary research area that interests you?” I wasn’t at all surprised to hear Dr. Stewart’s answer: “My primary focus is identity and how it both shapes and is shaped by various social and cultural classifications. Mainly I am focused on how health status effects identity and culture.” When I press him on what he means by cultural classifications, I was surprised to hear him respond that he goes beyond the context of racial or ethnic cultures. “Sure, I mean if you think about HIV/AIDs for example… HIV is so often associated with gay identities. Cultural attitudes about homosexuality informed the social response to the AIDS epidemic and treatment and prevention strategies. Also, gay identity created a counter movement, and race actually intersected with that. It’s taken a long time to realize that AIDS was disproportionately effecting people of color because of the racism even within the gay community. Being diagnosed with something like HIV reclassifies you; it puts you in a new problem-saturated position in the eyes of the people around you.” I had never really considered before how even a person’s ethnic culture can be transcended by a major change in life circumstance, such as by contracting HIV. “It’s a whole new set of identity crises, and that has been my focus since I did my undergraduate thesis in the 1990s.” I was born in 1992; I realize that Dr. Stewart has been studying this field since I was in diapers.
Problems within Community Psychology Research
We transitioned into talking about some of the major debates that occur within his area of research. Another classic Dr. Stewart moment, he chuckles to himself before he starts answering. “At the moment there are two.” The first one he mentions is the role of ‘expert’ or ‘scientific knowledge’ being put in opposition to lived experience. The example of HIV/AIDS is very pertinent in regard to this back-and-forth within the field. In the 1980s when the AIDS epidemic happened in America, the so-called experts kind of lagged in regards to getting anything done. It took the work of gay activists and organizations such as Gay Men’s Health Crisis to really get the ball going. Had the work of AIDS research been left entirely to the “experts,” who knows how long it would have taken for the treatments we now have to have entered the market. That hasn’t changed the public attitude towards including members of the community in the discussion. Even to this day, experts want to exclude people infected with HIV from joining the conversation about the disease.
The second major debate that Dr. Stewart mentioned was medicine’s tendency to focus on “cures” for everything. “There’s no attention given to how to live with a disease or coping strategies, and we have this idea that if we can’t ‘make it go away’ then we have failed.” I force myself to suppress asking him about that in relation to his class, as I’m pretending I have no idea what community psyche is. To follow up on these major debates, I ask Dr. Stewart about where his research fits within those debates. I was half expecting his answer: “I aspire to look at the debate itself rather than decide which side I’m on… For the most part I come down on the side of humans.” I was excited to hear Dr. Stewart say this because I find that I share this belief in the way I approach very politically charged topics. For example, when the abortion debates raged in mid-2019, I found myself believing that abortion shouldn’t be viewed in the light of “unwanted pregnancies,” however I also found myself trying to be sympathetic to the innumerable reasons why a woman may consider abortion. Rather than dig in my heels and demand that my beliefs are “right,” I think it’s much more effective to objectively look at all of the involved facts and make decisions that benefits the most people with those facts. (Is abortion killing babies? I won’t comment on that; but I will say that the foster care system in this country is woefully inadequate at best. Anyways, tangent aside…)
There’s a major problem with this more “centrist approach” to how we look at social problems: Coming down on “the side of the people” and trying to incorporate critical theory is often looked at as being elitist. “It’s so hard to change things.” Dr. Stewart laments. “People get into psyche ‘cause they wanna help.” So, why did you get into it Dr. Stewart? What have been your contributions? “I’ve made critical theory [about CP] more accessible and useful in some of the things I’ve published. My goal is for people to say, ‘Oh, I see why that’s useful now!’ or ‘Oh, maybe I should read Foucault.’ But it’s still hard to give up the idea of aspiring to be the ‘expert.’ It’s alluring and hard to give up.” I couldn’t help but pick up the not-so-subtle insinuation that a major problem in his field is spending a lot of energy establishing your right to exist in the field of psychology.
The Many Facets of Community Psychology
If I return to the idea of defining what CP is, it’s helpful to look at all of the various fields that it draws from. “Anthropology, cultural studies, sociology… cultural studies is kind of the ‘critical power studies’ branch of anthropology. There’s a lot of health aspects so I do a lot of work with medicine- though most doctors would disagree. There’s still a lot of clinical psyche intertwined with community psyche so I draw on that a lot.” Despite the myriad of related fields, Dr. Stewart has emphasized a number of times that his primary focus is on cultural studies (and not just limited to ethnic or racial cultures) so I press him a little on what he means by that. “There are so many cultural biases, it’s impossible to draw free from that shadow. Culture works best when it’s invisible. I try to pull people out of their biases, make them more aware of it. I tell them, ‘God didn’t make it that way, culture did.’” As I will learn later in the interview, a lot of community psychology is establishing its right to exist.
The Methods of Research in Community Psychology
I transition into asking Dr. Stewart what kinds of methods he uses to perform research. Surely psychology must be strictly qualitative? “Well, kind of. When I was an undergrad, they made us do a lot of quantitative research just to prove that we could.” CP bucks the trend of always looking strictly at the “average man.” A lot of the ways we approach psychology even to this day is based off of the average cis, white, hetero, male with a Christian background, as I learned in class last quarter. “We’re so mired in that ‘mean, statistical average every man’ but there’s so much room for more qualitative research. It’s hard to answer what things mean with quantitative data.” To that end, community psychologists conduct a lot of interviews and, ironic to this assignment, ethnographic studies. An anthropologist might look at CP and say, “That’s not ethnography or clinical ethnography” but the truth is that they do use a lot of theory. “Psychology still wants to align more with the natural sciences,” Dr. Stewart smirks. “The field always has this insecurity of not being ‘sciency’ enough.’” I was taken slightly aback by what he was saying. I have always admired psychology, even as a member of an evangelical cult that denounced it. Does that mean that psychology, especially community psychology, is not respected either as a social much less a natural science? “Kind of. The real pressure in psyche is to do ‘tight empirical or experimental research design.’” This makes me think of when we learned about empiricism and positivism in our readings this quarter. There’s a philosophical branch of epistemology that the only rationally held beliefs are ones that you can undeniably prove. How much of psychology is pure theory? Dr. Stewart doesn’t seem too phased, however, as he states this matter-of-factly. “Really, most of our research is descriptive and correlational. Other cultures have developed fairly advanced technologies and have managed to balance empirical data while still considering context and questions about meaning, values, and goodness. It’s ironic that we seem to have forgotten wisdom in our quest for knowledge.” I have to laugh. He reminded me of a scene from a Star Wars movie: “I’d have thought you Jedi would have more respect for the difference between knowledge and wisdom!”
Since he touched on positivist ideas, I felt compelled to ask him specifically if there is a fight in this country between belief and positivism. I can’t help but admire his balanced response: “American cultural DNA has that pull between Christian puritanical roots and the aspirational capitalist roots. Historically the left was critical of science. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the evangelical movement started in politics in a real way, with the resurgence of the critique of evolution, psyche, coming from that place of religion. Even today, many people that were real critics of science, especially in the context of climate change, begin to say “I think I would like some science!” Science feels better than what politicians want to makeup. A lot of what we see today has more to do with wanting to monetize knowledge.”
Challenges Specific to Community Psychology
What are some of the challenges that Dr. Stewart faces in his field of research? “It takes a lot of time. People aren’t sure if they really want to talk to a psychologist. If you can even get grant money, it runs out quickly. Your dissertation timeline looks too long, you start to wonder if you’ll get tenure… It’s a mess.” But the hardest part about community psychology is that it constantly has to defend itself. People know what psychology is. They know what sociology is. They know what anthropology is. But throw that “community” qualifier before the word “psychology” and you have, at best, a guess that it has to do with the psychology of communities. “Community psyche requires that people be able to hold opposing viewpoints in their mind at the same time. Most people don’t want to do that. When confronted with information that doesn’t fit in categories they don’t ‘get it.’” I myself am actually quite familiar with this phenomena. It’s called “cognitive dissonance.” When you are presented with information that is totally at odds with your world beliefs, you are forced to either tear down your worldview (which rarely happens) or outright reject it, even if the presented info is objectively factual. “My main issue is helping people to ‘get it.’ The only thing younger than community psychology is cultural psyche.” Dr. Stewart mentions that he is a reviewer for the American Journal of Clinical Pathology. “I get so many bad submissions. Community psychology lacks ‘institutional wisdom.’” The relative newness of the field means that a lot of the theories and methodologies aren’t “time tested.”
The Importance of Community Psychology
With the challenges of his field in mind, I ask Dr. Stewart to comment on what is the most important aspect of his research. He stops to think for a minute. “Analyzing data and grounding,” he finally responds. Wait, “analysis and theory building?” My mind races- didn’t we go over that in class? Ah yes, he does inductive research! The problem with doing all of this in depth qualitative research is that, in regards to CP work, you rarely have a question when you begin. You may have a seed of an idea, but you have to go out and start doing work before it goes anywhere. I actually ran into this issue this quarter as I had wanted to do an undergraduate research project. I had a seed of an idea, but the more I was field-testing how I wanted to conduct my research, the more and more it changed. Looking at all of the data, you’re left to wonder: “What does that mean? What’s interesting about that? What matters about that? How does that change my preconceptions?” You would think that community psychologists have to “reinvent the wheel” every time they go to do research. “I probably should be!” Dr. Stewart laughs. “Making sure your methodologies are actually responsive to the phenomena of interest is important.” What was the term we learned for that? Internal validity- that’s what community psychology hungers for. However, for Dr. Stewart, he has reached a point in his career where he is relatively comfortable in how he approaches his work. “Had you asked me that 20 years ago I would have said, ‘Definitely! I’m on the cutting edge!’ As I’ve gotten older, meh no.” He laughs that classic Dr. Stewart laugh. “It eventually gets to the point where I just say, ‘Hey, let’s just go find people to talk to.’”
I concluded my interview with Dr. Stewart by thanking him for, not just his time, but for actually changing the trajectory of my life. There have been a lot of concepts that I knew intuitively but when I took his class, it finally gave me the theoretical context to be able to explore them. He laughs at my flattery. “Great.” I can never tell if he legitimately means it or not. We shake hands and I leave the room, remarking that I’m excited for next quarter when we will be sharing the classroom once again in abnormal psychology.
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