Library homepage

  • school Campus Bookshelves
  • menu_book Bookshelves
  • perm_media Learning Objects
  • login Login
  • how_to_reg Request Instructor Account
  • hub Instructor Commons
  • Download Page (PDF)
  • Download Full Book (PDF)
  • Periodic Table
  • Physics Constants
  • Scientific Calculator
  • Reference & Cite
  • Tools expand_more
  • Readability

selected template will load here

This action is not available.

Social Sci LibreTexts

3.2: Problem Solving Approaches and Interventions

  • Last updated
  • Save as PDF
  • Page ID 43049

  • Vera Kennedy
  • West Hills College Lemoore

There are six problem solving approaches and interventions most commonly used among practitioners. Each approach examines a different aspect of a social problem. The nature of the problem and people involved determines the most appropriate intervention to apply.

A social systems approach examines the social structure surrounding the problem or issue. This approach requires macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis (see pages 12-13) to help understand the structure of the problem and the arrangement of individuals and social groups involved. Analysis requires comprehension of the entire issue and parts associated, as well as, which components and protocols of the structure are independent or dependent of each other. Application of this approach requires grasp of the complete problem including the hierarchy, order, patterns, and boundaries of individuals and social groups including their interactions, relationships, and processes as a body or structure surrounding the issue (Bruhn and Rebach 2007).

image21.png

The interventions deployed using a social systems approach focus on establishing and maintaining stability for all parties even while change is occurring. Social system interventions require change agents or leaders such as sociological practitioners to help control and guide inputs (what is put in or taken into the problem) and outputs (what is produced, delivered, or supplied resulting from change) used in problem solving (Bruhn and Rebach 2007). This approach requires the involvement of everyone in the social structure to design or re-design the system and processes around the issue.

The human ecology approach examines the “web of life” or the ecosystem of a social problem or issue. This approach is often visually represented by a spider web to demonstrate how lives are interlinked and interdependent. A human ecology approach focuses on macro and meso levels of analysis to develop knowledge about the social bonds, personal needs, and environmental conditions that impede or support life challenges and opportunities for individuals. Practitioners evaluate and analyze where individuals and groups fit in the social structure or ecosystem and their roles. The purpose of this approach is to identify cognitive and emotional boundaries people experience living in social systems to help confront and remove the obstacles they face.

clipboard_e9a3d97a23679cdfc751942f93d2091a8.png

Interventions applied in a human ecological approach target changes in families, institutions, and small communities. The goal is to confront the stressors and strain created by social situations and settings. Interventions from a human ecology approach help people determine acceptable behaviors within different social environments (Bruhn and Rebach 2007). Practitioners work with social groups to remove collaborative challenges between groups in a social ecosystem and the individuals working and living within them. Change is concentrated on developing a new system and process to support and remove obstacles for individuals effected by a social problem.

  • Describe the social systems approach and explain what type of social problems or issues this approach is the most valid method to use.
  • Describe the human ecology approach and explain what type of social problem or issues this approach is the most valid method to use.
  • A county mental health court
  • Gender neutral bathrooms on a college campus
  • Anti-bullying campaign in local K-12 schools

A life cycle approach examines the developmental stages and experiences of individuals facing issues or various life crises. Meso and micro levels of analysis are required with this method. Data gathered assists practitioners in understanding the adaption of individuals or groups to change, challenges, and demands at each developmental stage of life (Bruhn and Rebach 2007). Analysis incorporates evaluation of interpersonal connections between a person and the environment, life transitions, and patterns. This approach if applicable when working with individuals, groups, and organizations, which all have and go through a life cycle and stages of development.

Interventions using this approach target changes in social norms and expectations of individuals or groups facing difficulties. Practitioners help identify the context and issues creating anxiety among individuals or groups and facilitate coping strategies to attack their issues. This approach builds on positive personal and social resources and networks to mend, retrain, or enable development and growth.

clipboard_ed73011813305ed2e253402bf4b62a735.png

The clinical approach evaluates disease, illness, and distress. Both meso and micro levels of analysis are required for this method. Practitioners assess biological, personal, and environmental connections by surveying the patient or client’s background, and current and recent conditions (Bruhn and Rebach 2007). A Patient Evaluation Grid (PEG) is the most commonly used tool for data collection. This approach requires in-depth interactions with the patient or client to identify themes associated with their condition and the structure of the social system related to their illness and support. When applying this approach in medical practice, the evaluation and analysis leads to a diagnosis.

  • Describe the life cycle approach and explain what type of social problems or issues this approach is the most valid method to use.
  • Describe the clinical approach and explain what type of social problem or issues this approach is the most valid method to use.
  • Policing strategies to reduce crime and improve community relationships
  • Reductions in self-injury or cutting among teens
  • A community college social work education degree program

Intervention in a clinical approach concentrates on removal of symptoms, condition, or changes in the individual to solve the problem. The overarching goal of this method is to prevent the problem from reoccurring and the solution from interfering with the individual’s functioning. Problem management must minimally disrupt the social system of the patient or client.

A social norms approach focuses on peer influences to provide individuals with accurate information and role models to induce change (Bruhn and Rebach 2007). This approach observes macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis. Intervention centers on providing correct perceptions about thinking and behavior to induce change in one’s thoughts and actions. This technique is a proactive prevention model aimed at addressing something from happening or arising.

There are three levels of intervention when applying a social norms approach (Bruhn and Rebach 2007). Practitioners use interventions independently or together for a comprehensive solution. At the universal level of intervention , all members of a population receive the intervention without identifying which individuals are at risk. A selective level of intervention directs assistance or services to an entire group of at risk individuals. When specific individuals are beyond risk and already show signs of the problem, they receive an indicated level of intervention . A comprehensive intervention requires an integration of all three levels.

Practitioners assist communities in problem solving by applying a community based approach . All three levels of analysis (macro, meso, and micro) are required for this method. The aim of this approach is to plan, develop, and implement community based interventions whereby local institutions and residents participate in problem solving and work towards preventing future issues. Practitioners work with communities on three outcomes, individual empowerment, connecting people, and improving social interactions and cooperation (Bruhn and Rebach 2007). Concentrating on these outcomes builds on community assets while tailoring solutions to local political, economic, and social conditions. By building bridges among individuals and groups in the community, practitioners facilitate connections between services, programs, and policies while attacking the problem from multiple vantage points.

clipboard_e1fd5a85770066af4dacde6107695f9f0.png

A community based approach helps ensure problem analysis, evaluation, and interventions are culturally and geographically appropriate for local residents, groups, and organizations. To operate effectively, this intervention requires practitioners to help facilitate face-to-face interactions among community members and develop a communication pattern for solving community problems. To build an appropriate intervention, practitioners must develop knowledge and understanding about the purpose, structure, and process of each group, organization, and collaboration within the community (Bruhn and Rebach 2007). Upon implementation, a community based approach endows local residents and organizations to observe and monitor their own progress and solutions directly.

  • Describe the social norms approach and explain what type of social problems or issues this approach is the most valid method to use.
  • Describe the community based approach and explain what type of social problem or issues this approach is the most valid method to use.
  • Human trafficking prevention program
  • Reductions in electronic cigarette, vaping, and new tobacco product usage

problem solving approach in community

Search form

problem solving approach in community

  • Table of Contents
  • Troubleshooting Guide
  • A Model for Getting Started
  • Justice Action Toolkit
  • Coronavirus Response Tool Box
  • Best Change Processes
  • Databases of Best Practices
  • Online Courses
  • Ask an Advisor
  • Subscribe to eNewsletter
  • Community Stories
  • YouTube Channel
  • About the Tool Box
  • How to Use the Tool Box
  • Privacy Statement
  • Workstation/Check Box Sign-In
  • Online Training Courses
  • Capacity Building Training
  • Training Curriculum - Order Now
  • Community Check Box Evaluation System
  • Build Your Toolbox
  • Facilitation of Community Processes
  • Community Health Assessment and Planning
  • Section 2. Thinking Critically

Chapter 17 Sections

  • Section 1. An Introduction to the Problem-Solving Process
  • Section 3. Defining and Analyzing the Problem
  • Section 4. Analyzing Root Causes of Problems: The "But Why?" Technique
  • Section 5. Addressing Social Determinants of Health and Development
  • Section 6. Generating and Choosing Solutions
  • Section 7. Putting Your Solution into Practice
  • Main Section

What is critical thinking?

Why is critical thinking important, who can (and should) learn to think critically, how do you help people learn to think critically.

Suppose an elected official makes a speech in which he says, "The government doesn't need to be involved in cleaning up pollution from manufacturing. Business can take care of this more efficiently." What's your reaction?

There are a lot of questions you can be asking here, some of which you may already know the answers to. First, what are the assumptions behind this person's statement? How does he view the job of government, for instance? What's his attitude toward business? Does he believe pollution is a real threat to the environment?

Next, you might want to consider the official's biases. What party does this politician belong to, and what's that party's position on pollution regulation? What state is he from -- one with a lot of industry that contributes to acid rain and other pollution? What's his voting record on environmental issues? Is he receiving contributions from major polluters? Does he live in a place that's seriously affected by pollution? What does he know about the science involved? (What do you know about the science involved?) Does he have any knowledge or expertise in this area at all?

Finally, you might want answers to some questions about the context of the statement. What's the record of private industry over the last 10 years in cleaning up its own pollution without government intervention, for instance? What does pollution look like now, as compared to before the government regulated it? For that matter, when did government regulation start? What effect did it have? Perhaps even more important, who will benefit if these ideas are accepted? Who will lose? What will the result be if things are changed in the direction this politician suggests? Are those results good for the country?

If you ask the kinds of questions suggested here when you see new information, or consider a situation or a problem or an issue, you're using critical thinking. Critical thinking is tremendously important in health, human service, and community work because it allows you to understand the actual issues involved, and to come up with an approach that is likely to address them effectively.

There are many definitions of critical thinking. Some see it as a particular way of handling information. Others look at it as a specific set of skills and abilities. People interested in political and social change see it as challenging and providing alternatives to the generally accepted beliefs and values of the power structure. They're all right to an extent: critical thinking is all of these things, and more.

Critical thinking is the process of examining, analyzing, questioning, and challenging situations, issues, and information of all kinds. We use it when we raise questions about:

  • Survey results
  • Personal comments
  • Media stories
  • Our own personal relationships
  • Scientific research
  • Political statements
  • And (especially) conventional wisdom, general assumptions, and the pronouncements of authority

Critical thinking is an important tool in solving community problems and in developing interventions or initiatives in health, human services, and community development.

Elements of critical thinking

There are a number of ways to look at the process of critical thinking. Brookfield presents several, with this one being perhaps the simplest.

  • Problem/goal identification : What is the real issue here?
  • Diagnosis: Given all the information we have, what's the best way to deal with this issue?
  • Exploration: How do we do what we decided on, and who will make it happen?
  • Action: Do it!
  • Reflection: Did it work? If so, how can it work better? If not, what went wrong, and how can we fix it? What have we learned here that might be valuable in the future?

Reflection leads you to the consideration of another problem or goal, and the cycle begins again.

Critical thinking involves being thrown into the questioning mode by an event or idea that conflicts with your understanding of the world and makes you uncomfortable. If you allow yourself to respond to the discomfort -- that's partially an issue of personal development -- you'll try to figure out where it comes from, and to come up with other ways to understand the situation. Ultimately, if you persist, you'll have a new perspective on the event itself, and will have broken through to a more critical understanding.

Goals of critical thinking

  • Truth: to separate what is true from what is false, or partially true, or incomplete, or slanted, or based on false premises, or assumed to be true because "everyone says so."
  • Context: to consider the context and history of issues, problems, or situations.
  • Assumptions: to understand the assumptions and purposes behind information or situations.
  • Alternatives: to create ways of approaching problems, issues, and situations that address the real, rather than assumed or imagined, factors that underlie or directly cause them -- even when those factors turn out to be different from what you expected.
The word "critical" here means approaching everything as if you were a critic -- questioning it, analyzing it, putting it in context, looking at its origins. The aim is to understand it on its deepest level. "Everything" includes yourself: thinking critically includes identifying, admitting, and examining your own assumptions and prejudices, and understanding how they change your reactions to and your interpretation of information. It also means being willing to change your ideas and conclusions -- and actions -- if an objective view shows that they're wrong or ineffective. This last point is important. In health, human service, and community work, the main goal of thinking critically is almost always to settle on an action that will have some desired effect. Critical examination of the situation and the available information could lead to anything from further study to organizing a strike, but it should lead to something. Once you've applied critical thinking to an issue, so that you understand what's likely to work, you have to take action to change the situation.

Without thinking critically, you're only looking at the surface of things. When you come across a politician's statement in the media, do you accept it at face value? Do you accept some people's statements and not others'? The chances are you exercise at least some judgment, based on what you know about the particular person, and whether you generally agree with her or not.

Knowing whether or not you agree with someone is not necessarily the same as critical thinking, however. Your reaction may be based on emotion ("I hate that guy!"), or on the fact that this elected official supports programs that are in your interest, even though they may not be in the best interests of everyone else. What's important about critical thinking is that it helps you to sort out what's accurate and what's not, and to give you a solid, factual base for solving problems or addressing issues.

Specific reasons for the importance of critical thinking:

  • It identifies bias. Critical thinking identifies both the bias in what it looks at (its object), and the biases you yourself bring to it. If you can address these honestly, and adjust your thinking accordingly, you'll be able to see the object in light of the way it's slanted, and to understand your own biases in your reaction to it.

A bias is not necessarily bad: it is simply a preferred way of looking at things. You can be racially biased, but you can also be biased toward looking at all humans as one family. You can be biased toward a liberal or conservative political point of view, or toward or against tolerance. Regardless of whether most of us would consider a particular bias good or bad, not seeing it can limit how we resolve a problem or issue.

  • It's oriented toward the problem, issue, or situation that you're addressing. Critical thinking focuses on analyzing and understanding its object. It eliminates, to the extent possible, emotional reactions, except where they become part of an approach or solution.
It's just about impossible to eliminate emotions, or to divorce them from your own deeply-held assumptions and beliefs. You can, however, try to understand that they're present, and to analyze your own emotional reactions and those of others in the situation. There are different kinds of emotional reactions. If all the evidence points to something being true, your emotional reaction that it's not true isn't helpful, no matter how badly you want to believe it. On the other hand, if a proposed solution involves harming a particular group of people "for the good of the majority", an emotional reaction that says "we can't let this happen" may be necessary to change the situation so that its benefits can be realized without harm to anyone. Emotions that allow you to deny reality generally produce undesirable results; emotions that encourage you to explore alternatives based on principles of fairness and justice can produce very desirable results.
  • It gives you the whole picture. Critical thinking never considers anything in a vacuum. Its object has a history, a source, a context. Thinking critically allows you to bring these into play, thus getting more than just the outline of what you're examining, and making a realistic and effective solution to a problem more likely.
  • It brings in other necessary factors. Some of the things that affect the object of critical thought -- previous situations, personal histories, general assumptions about an issue -- may need to be examined themselves. Critical thinking identifies them and questions them as well.
During the mid-90's debate in the United States over welfare reform, much fuss was made over the amount of federal money spent on welfare. Few people realized, however, that the whole entitlement program accounted for less than 2% of the annual federal budget. During the height of the debate, Americans surveyed estimated the amount of their taxes going to welfare at as much as 60%. Had they examined the general assumptions they were using, they might have thought differently about the issue.
  • It considers both the simplicity and complexity of its object. A situation or issue may have a seemingly simple explanation or resolution, but it may rest on a complex combination of factors. Thinking critically unravels the relationships among these, and determines what level of complexity needs to be dealt with in order to reach a desired conclusion.
  • It gives you the most nearly accurate view of reality. The whole point of critical thinking is to construct the most objective view available. 100% objectivity may not be possible, but the closer you can get, the better.
  • Most important, for all the above reasons, it is most likely to help you get the results you want. The closer you are to dealing with things as they really are, the more likely you are to be able to address a problem or issue with some hope of success.
In more general terms, the real value of critical thinking is that it's been at the root of all human progress. The first ancestor of humans who said to himself, "We've always made bone tools, but they break awfully easily. I bet we could make tools out of something else. What if I tried this rock?" was using critical thinking. So were most of the social, artistic, and technological groundbreakers who followed. You'd be hard pressed to find an advance in almost any area of humanity's development that didn't start with someone looking at the way things were and saying "It doesn't have to be that way. What if we looked at it from another angle?"

The answer here is everyone, from children to senior citizens. Even small children can learn about such things as cause and effect -- a specific event having a specific result -- through a combination of their own experimentation and experience and of being introduced to more complex ideas by others.

Accepted wisdom, perhaps dispensed by a teacher or other authority figure, is, however, often the opposite of critical thinking, which relies on questioning. In many schools, for example, critical thinkers are, if not punished, stifled because of their "disruptive " need to question (and thereby challenge authority). Interestingly enough, the more a school costs -- whether it's a well-funded public school in an affluent community, or an expensive private school -- the more apt it is to encourage and teach critical thinking. Such schools see themselves, and are seen by their students' parents, as trainers of leaders...and leaders need to know how to think.

Many adults exercise critical thinking as a matter of course. Many more know how, but for various reasons -- fear, perceived self-interest, deeply held prejudices or unexamined beliefs -- choose not to. Still more, perhaps a majority, are capable of learning to think critically, but haven't been taught or exposed to the experiences that would have allowed them to learn on their own.

It is this last group that is both most in need of, and most receptive to, learning to think critically. It often includes people with relatively low levels of education and income who see themselves as powerless. Once they grasp the concept of critical thought, it can change their whole view of the world. Often, the experience of being involved in a community initiative or intervention provides the spur for that learning.

Critical thinking requires the capacity for abstract thought. This is the ability to think about what's not there -- to foresee future consequences and possibilities, to think about your own thinking, to imagine scenarios that haven't yet existed. Most people are capable of learning to think in this way, if given the encouragement and opportunity.
Learning to think critically is more often than not a long process. Many people have to learn to think abstractly -- itself a long process -- before they can really apply the principles of critical thinking. Even those who already have that ability are often slowed, or even stopped, by the developmental and psychological -- and sometimes the actual -- consequences of what they're being asked to do. Often, it takes a crisis of some sort, or a series of negative experiences to motivate people to be willing to think in a different way. Even then, developing the capacity for critical thinking doesn't necessarily make things better. It can alter family relationships, change attitudes toward work and community issues, and bring discord into a life where none was recognized before. Learning it takes courage. The point of all this is that, although there's a series of what we believe are effective how-to steps laid out in this section, teaching critical thinking is not magic. The reason we keep using the words "develop" and "process" is that critical thinking, if it takes root, develops over time. Don't be frustrated if many people don't seem to get it immediately: they won't.

Helping others learn to think critically can take place in a classroom -- it's essentially what higher education is all about -- but it's probably even more common in other situations. Community interventions of all kinds provide opportunities for learning, both because participants are usually involved over a period of time, and because they are often experiencing difficulties that make it clear to them that their world view isn't adequate to solve the problems they face. Many are ready to change, and welcome the chance to challenge the way things are and learn new ways of thinking.

By the same token, learning to think critically can be a frightening process. It leads you to question ideas that you may have taken for granted all your life, and to challenge authority figures whom you may have held in awe. It may push you to tackle problems you thought were insoluble. It's the intellectual equivalent of bungee jumping: once you've leaped off the bridge, there's no going back, and you have to trust that the cord will hold you.

As a result, facilitating critical thinking -- whether formally or informally -- requires more than just a knowledge of the process. It demands that you be supportive, encouraging, and honest, and that you act as role model, constantly demonstrating the process as you discuss it.

There are really three aspects of helping people develop critical thinking: how to be a facilitator for the process; how to help people develop the "critical stance," the mindset that leads them to apply critical thinking all the time; and how to help people learn to apply critical thinking to dealing with community problems and issues.

How to be a critical thinking facilitator

Stephen Brookfield has developed a 10-point guideline for facilitators of critical thinking that focuses both on the learner and the facilitator herself.

  • Affirm learners' self-worth. Critical thinking is an intellectual exercise, but it is also a matter of confidence and courage. Learners need to have the self -esteem to believe that authority figures or established beliefs could be wrong, and to challenge them. Facilitators need to encourage that self-esteem by confirming that learners' opinions matter and are worthy of respect, that they themselves have and deserve a voice.
  • Listen attentively to learners. Repeat back their words and ideas, so they know they've been heard. What they say can reveal hidden conflicts and assumptions that can then be questioned.
  • Show your support for critical thinking efforts. Reward learners for challenging assumptions, even when they're your own.
  • Reflect and mirror learners' ideas and actions. That will help to identify assumptions and biases they may not be aware of.
  • Motivate people to think critically, but help them to understand when it's appropriate to voice critical ideas and when it's not. The wrong word to the boss could get a learner fired, for example. It's important that he understand the possible consequences of talking about his conclusions before he does it.
  • Regularly evaluate progress with learners. Critical thinking involves reflection as well as action, and part of that reflection should be on the process itself.
  • Help learners create networks of support. These can include both other learners and others in the community who are learning to or who already practice and support critical thinking.
  • Be a critical teacher. Model the critical thinking process in everything you do (particularly, if you're a teacher, in the way you teach), encourage learners to challenge your assumptions and ideas, and challenge them yourself.
  • Make people aware of how they learn critical thinking. Discuss learning and thinking styles, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, learning methods, the role of previous experience, etc. The more conscious you can make people of their preferred ways of learning, the easier it will be for them to understand how they're approaching ideas and situations and to adjust if necessary.
  • Model critical thinking. Approach ideas and situations critically and, to the extent possible, explain your thinking so learners can see the process you've used to arrive at your conclusions.

How to encourage the critical stance

Developing the critical stance -- the generalized ability and disposition to apply critical thinking to whatever you encounter -- is a crucial element in teaching critical thinking. It includes recognizing assumptions -- your own and others' -- applying that recognition to questioning information and situations, and considering their context.

Recognize assumptions. Each of us has a set of assumptions -- ideas or attitudes or "facts" we take for granted -- that underlies our thinking. Only when you're willing to look at these assumptions and realize how they color your conclusions can you examine situations, problems, or issues objectively.

Assumptions are based on a number of factors -- physical, environmental, psychological, and experiential -- that we automatically, and often unconsciously, bring to bear on anything we think about. One of the first steps in encouraging the critical stance is to try to make these factors conscious. Besides direct discussion, role plays, discussions of hypothetical or relatively non-threatening real situations, and self -revelation on the facilitator's part ("Some of my own assumptions are...") can all be ways to help people think about the preconceptions they bring to any situation.

Sources of assumptions are numerous and overlapping, but the most important are:

  • Senses. The impact of the senses is so elemental that we sometimes react to it without realizing we're doing so. You may respond to a person based on smells you're barely aware of, for instance.
  • Experience. Each of us has a unique set of experiences, and they influence our responses to what we encounter. Ultimately, as critical thinkers, we have to understand both how past experience might limit our thinking in a situation, and how we can use it to see things more clearly.
  • Values. Values are deeply held beliefs -- often learned from families, schools, and peers -- about how the world should be. These "givens" may be difficult even to recognize, let alone reject. It further complicates matters that values usually concern the core issues of our lives: personal and sexual relationships, morality, gender and social roles, race, social class, and the organization of society, to name just a few.
  • Emotion. Recognizing our emotional reactions is vital to keeping them from influencing our conclusions. Anger at child abusers may get in the way of our understanding the issue clearly, for example. We can't control whether emotions come up, but we can understand how we react to them.
  • Self interest. Whether we like it or not, each of us sometimes injects what is best for ourselves into our decisions. We have to be aware when self interest gets in the way of reason, or of looking at the other interests in the situation.
  • Culture. The culture we grew up in, the culture we've adopted, the predominant culture in the society -- all have their effects on us, and push us into thinking in particular ways. Understanding how culture acts upon our and others' thinking makes it possible to look at a problem or issue in a different light.
  • History. Community history, the history of our organization or initiative, and our own history in dealing with particular problems and issues will all have an impact on the way we think about the current situation.
  • Religion. Our own religious backgrounds -- whether we still practice religion or not -- may be more powerful than we realize in influencing our thinking.
  • Biases. Very few of us, regardless of what we'd like to believe, are free of racial or ethnic prejudices of some sort, or of political, moral, and other biases that can come into play here.
  • Prior knowledge. What we know about a problem or issue, from personal experience, from secondhand accounts, or from theory, shapes our responses to it. We have to be sure, however, that what we "know" is in fact true, and relevant to the issue at hand.
  • Conventional wisdom. All of us have a large store of information "everybody knows" that we apply to new situations and problems. Unfortunately, the fact that everybody knows it doesn't make it right. Conventional wisdom is often too conventional: it usually reflects the simplest way of looking at things. We may need to step outside the conventions to look for new solutions.
This is often the case when people complain that "common sense" makes the solution to a problem obvious. Many people believe, for instance, that it is "common sense " that sex education courses for teens encourage them to have sex. The statistics show that, in fact, teens with adequate sexual information tend to be less sexually active than their uninformed counterparts.

Examine information for accuracy, assumptions, biases, or specific interests. Helping learners discuss and come up with the kinds of questions that they need to subject information to is probably the best way to facilitate here. Using current examples -- comparing various newspaper and TV news stories, for instance, to see what different aspects are emphasized, or to see how all ignore the same issues -- can also be a powerful way of demonstrating what needs to be asked. Some basic questions are:

  • What's the source of the information? Knowing where information originates can tell you a lot about what it's meant to make you believe.
  • Does the source generally produce accurate information?
  • What are the source's assumptions about the problem or issue? Does the source have a particular interest or belong to a particular group that will allow you to understand what it believes about the issue the information refers to?
  • Does the source have biases or purposes that would lead it to slant information in a particular way, or to lie outright? Politicians and political campaigns often "spin" information so that it seems to favor them and their positions. People in the community may do the same, or may "know" things that don't happen to be true.
  • Does anyone in particular stand to benefit or lose if the information is accepted or rejected? To whose advantage is it if the information is taken at face value?
  • Is the information complete? Are there important pieces missing? Does it tell you everything you need to know? Is it based on enough data to be accurate?
Making sure you have all the information can make a huge difference. Your information might be that a certain approach to this same issue worked well in a similar community. What you might not know or think to ask, however, is whether there's a reason that the same approach wouldn't work in this community. If you investigated, you might find it had been tried and failed for reasons that would doom it again. You'd need all the information before you could reasonably address the issue.
  • Is the information logically consistent? Does it make sense? Do arguments actually prove what they pretend to prove? Learning how to sort out logical and powerful arguments from inconsistent or meaningless ones is perhaps the hardest task for learners. Some helpful strategies here might include mock debates, where participants have to devise arguments for the side they disagree with; analysis of TV news programs, particularly those like "Meet the Press," where political figures defend their positions; and after-the-fact discussions of community or personal situations.
Just about anyone can come up with an example that "proves" a particular point: There's a woman down the block who cheats on welfare, so it's obvious that most welfare recipients cheat. You can't trust members of that ethnic group, because one of them stole my wallet. Neither of these examples "proves" anything, because it's based on only one instance, and there's no logical reason to assume it holds for a larger group. A former president was particularly fond of these kinds of "proofs", and as a result often proposed simplistic solutions to complex social problems. Without information that's logically consistent and at least close to complete, you can't draw conclusions that will help you effectively address an issue.
  • Is the information clear? Do you understand what you're seeing?
  • Is the information relevant to the current situation? Information may be accurate, complete, logically consistent, powerful...and useless, because it has nothing to do with what you're trying to deal with.
An AIDS prevention initiative, for instance, may find that a particular neighborhood has a large number of gay residents. However, if the HIV-positive rate in the gay community is nearly nonexistent, and the real AIDS problem in town is among IV drug users, the location of the gay community is irrelevant information.
  • Most important, is the information true? Outright lies and made-up "facts" are not uncommon in politics, community work, and other situations. Knowing the source and its interests, understanding the situation, and being sensibly skeptical can help to protect learners from acting on false information.

Consider the context of the information, problem, or issue. Examining context, in most instances, is easier to approach than the other elements of the critical stance. It involves more concrete and "objective" information, and, at least in the case of community issues, it is often information that learners already know.

Facilitating techniques might include brainstorming to identify context elements; discussing how context issues affected real situations that learners are familiar with; and asking small groups of learners to make up their own examples. The real task is making sure that they include as many different factors as possible. Some areas to be examined in considering a community issue, for instance, are:

  • The nature of the community. A big city is likely to present different solutions to a problem than a small town, and both differ from a suburb or a rural area. Understanding the resources, challenges, and peculiarities of a community is important to addressing its issues.
  • The social situation. A community may be divided among several mutually hostile ethnic or political groups, or among groups that simply have different ideas about how things should be done. There may be class, race, or other issues to deal with.
  • Individuals. Individuals can strongly influence the workings of a community, often in ways that aren't immediately apparent. People can spread or squelch rumors, create harmony or dissension, lead others toward constructive solutions or toward disorganization and ineffectiveness.
  • Cultures. Cultures -- which can be based on ethnic ties, religion, class, or other factors (think of the jocks, preppies, punks, skaters, and other groups in a high school)-- can create alliances or divisions, and heavily influence how different groups see an issue and its implications.
  • Physical environment. A trash-filled, crumbling urban neighborhood can breed despair and fear. Changing the face of that neighborhood may do a great deal to change the situation of people who live there as well, giving them hope and pride of ownership, as well as diminishing violence and crime by increasing light and accessibility. The role of the physical environment is one that has to be examined in any community issue.
  • History. It's crucial to examine the history of a problem or issue, as well as efforts to deal with it. The perfect solution you just came up with may have already ended in disaster five years ago. The person you depend on to explain the situation may have been prominent on one side of a huge conflict, and her presence may alienate anyone who was on the other. Bad feelings over real or perceived slights or dishonesty can persist for decades, and if you don't know about them, they can suddenly rise up, seemingly out of nowhere. Not only getting the history, but getting it from a number of different perspectives, is necessary to success in dealing with any problem or issue.
A group trying to bring public transportation to a rural area started by arranging a meeting between the select boards of the towns involved and the local regional transit authority. What the group didn't know was that, several years before, a small non -profit transportation company -- the chair of whose board was a revered local figure -- had been put out of business through some shady dealings by the regional transit authority. As a result, the towns refused to deal with the transit authority, even though it was now under completely new -- and ethical -- management.
  • The interests involved. If there is a conflict, what are the needs and aims of the various factions? Who stands to gain, and who stands to lose? What are the best interests of the community -- or can you determine that at all?

Facilitating problem solving using critical thinking

Actually using critical thinking to solve problems and address issues is, of course, the reason for learning it. Brookfield suggests one problem-solving sequence that can be used in many situations involving community issues. Once people have learned the critical stance, they can apply its principles using this sequence.

Identify the assumptions behind the problem. By asking people to clarify their statements, and by probing for specifics, you can help them look at what is behind their thinking. Some clarifications that you can ask for, accompanied by some of the questions you might ask:

There are actually two sets of assumptions that are important here. One is the set of assumptions that each of us brings to any problem or information, those described above under "How to encourage the critical stance." The other is the set of assumptions about the particular problem -- what the situation is, what the problem consists of, what a solution would look like, and how to achieve that solution. In fact, those two sets of assumptions are inseparable, and both need to be considered. The emphasis in what follows is on the second set of assumptions, that which refers to the problem itself. One of the assumptions of the Tool Box, however, is that you'll deal with both in a real situation.
  • The current situation. What exactly do you mean when you say things are bad? What things? How are they bad? What would be happening if they were good?
  • The problem itself. Can you describe another situation in which the same problem existed? What was happening then? Can you describe a situation in which things were good, and the problem didn't exist? What was happening then? What are the differences here?
  • Potential solutions to the problem. If we were able to solve this problem, what would that look like? What would be happening? Who would be involved?
  • Actions that would lead to the solution. How would what you're suggesting lead to a solution? What exactly would happen?

Challenge those assumptions. Once you've clarified the assumptions, everyone needs to question them.

  • The current situation. Are you sure that everything is bad? Are there good aspects to the situation? What about it specifically do you think is bad? Could that be interpreted in another way? Who might interpret it differently? Why? Are we even looking at the right aspects of the situation? Are we missing something important?
  • The problem itself. What exactly is the problem we're talking about? Are you sure that's really the problem? Could the problem be defined in another (this other) way? What's the actual concern here?
  • Potential solutions to the problem. What are the actual results we need here? (If we're trying to reduce the teen pregnancy rate in the community, for instance, are we aiming to provide a particular number of teens with information about birth control? With condoms and other birth control devices? Or are we aiming at an actual reduction in the teen pregnancy rate within a particular period...say, two years?)
  • Actions that would lead to the solution. Would what you're proposing actually accomplish what you expect it to? Would it really make a difference even if it did?

Imagine alternatives to what you started with. There are a number of ways you can construct different ways to deal with the problem. Two are:

  • Brainstorming. Everyone comes up with every alternative she can think of, no matter how silly it seems at the time. After all the ideas have been recorded, the group goes through them, and sorts out what seems worth pursuing. Sometimes the ideas that seem totally silly at first turn out to be the most valuable, which is why it's important to encourage people to blurt out whatever they think of.
  • Starting with the ideal endpoint. Determine what everything would look like if the ideal solution were achieved, then work backward from there to understand what you'd have to do to get there.
In dealing with teen pregnancy again, for instance, the ideal might be a community in which there were no teen pregnancies because all youth clearly understood the physical and emotional consequences of having sex; had adequate sexual information and access to birth control; and felt valued and empowered enough to respect one another and to maintain control over their own bodies. You might determine that that situation would require that there be sex education available through a variety of sources; that condom dispensers should be placed in various public places, and that pharmacies and convenience stores display birth control devices in ways attractive to teens; that every teen needed to have at least one caring adult in his or her life; and that the community valued youth and their contributions. In order for those things to happen, there might need to be a community education process, mechanisms for youth to become more integrated into the community as contributing members, as well as a group of adult volunteers who would act as mentors and friends to youth who had no positive relationships with adults. In order for those things to happen, you'd need to identify teens who had no positive adult role models...etc. If you followed all of this through to its end, you'd have a picture of the ideal solution to the problem and a road map telling you how to get there.

Critique the alternatives. Develop criteria on which you can judge the alternative solutions you've come up with. Some possibilities:

  • Effectiveness
  • Feasibility
  • Consistency with community needs
  • Consistency with the values of the group
  • Inclusiveness

Once you've selected criteria, another critical thinking exercise is to decide which are most important. In a particular situation, cost might have to be the most important factor. In another, you may be able to weight costs, benefits, and effectiveness together. In others, other criteria may be weighted more heavily.

Finally, apply the criteria to the alternatives you've come up with, and decide which is most likely to achieve the results you want.

Reframe the problem and solution. At this point, learners have come up with a solution. The point of reframing is to look at the problem in the light of all the work they've done. They've perhaps discovered that it was different from what they first thought, or that they needed to view it differently. Reframing solidifies that mindset, and ensures that they approach the problem as they've found it to be in actuality, rather than as they initially saw it.

  • The current situation. Start by restating the current situation, as you understand it after critical analysis, in the clearest and most specific terms possible.
  • The problem itself. Restate the actual problem as you now understand it.
  • Potential solutions to the problem. Explain what changes a solution would bring about, and what things would be like with the problem solved.
  • Actions that would lead to the solution. Lay out the alternative you've arrived at.

By and large, people learn critical thinking best when they're approaching real problems that affect their lives in real ways. That's one reason why community interventions and initiatives provide fertile ground for the development of critical thinking.

Critical thinking is a vital skill in health, human service, and community work. It is the process of questioning, examining, and analyzing situations, issues, problems, people (in hiring decisions, for instance) and information of all kinds -- survey results, theories, personal comments, media stories, history, scientific research, political statements, etc.-- from every possible angle. This will give you a view that's as nearly objective as possible, making it more likely that you'll be able to interpret information accurately and resolve problems and issues effectively.

Teaching critical thinking, whether formally or informally, requires a supportive and encouraging presence, and a willingness to both model and be the subject of critical analysis. It entails teaching the critical stance -- how to recognize and analyze your own and others' assumptions, question information, and examine the context of any information, situation, problem, or issue. Finally, it requires helping people to apply the critical stance to a problem and learn how to come up with a solution that is effective because it addresses the real issues involved. Once learners can do that, they're well on their way to successfully addressing the concerns of their communities.

Online Resources

Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum . Internal and external resources on critical thinking from Longview Community College, Lee's Summit, MO.

The Foundation for Critical Thinking .  Articles, references, links, lesson plans, etc. School and college oriented, but lots of good general material.

Mission Critical , an on-line course in critical thinking from an English professor at San Jose (CA) State University.

Print Resources

Brookfield, Stephen D. (1991). Developing Critical Thinkers, Reprint Edition, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, Inc.

Brookfield, Stephen D. (2012). Teaching for Critical Thinking, San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Cart

  • SUGGESTED TOPICS
  • The Magazine
  • Newsletters
  • Managing Yourself
  • Managing Teams
  • Work-life Balance
  • The Big Idea
  • Data & Visuals
  • Reading Lists
  • Case Selections
  • HBR Learning
  • Topic Feeds
  • Account Settings
  • Email Preferences

Community-Powered Problem Solving

  • Francis Gouillart
  • Douglas Billings

A health care initiative shows how brick-and-mortar businesses can co-create solutions with their partners and change the rules of the game.

Reprint: R1304D

Traditionally, companies have managed their constituencies with specific processes: marketing to customers, procuring from vendors, developing HR policies for employees, and so on. The problem is, such processes focus on repeatability and compliance, so they can lead to stagnation. Inviting your constituencies to collectively help you solve problems and exploit opportunities—“co-creation”—is a better approach. It allows you to continually tap the skills and insights of huge numbers of stakeholders and develop new ways to produce value for all.

The idea is to provide stakeholders with platforms (physical and digital forums) on which they can interact, get them to start exploring new experiences and connections, and let the system grow organically. A co-creation initiative by a unit of Becton, Dickinson and Company demonstrates how this works. A global leader in syringes, BD set out to deepen its ties with hospital customers and help them reduce the incidence of infections from unsafe injection and syringe disposal practices. The effort began with a cross-functional internal team, brought in the hospital procurement and supply managers BD had relationships with, and then reached out to hospitals’ infection-prevention and occupational health leaders. Eventually product designers, nurses, sustainability staffers, and even hospital CFOs were using the platform, contributing data that generated new best practices and reduced infections.

Idea in Brief

Large problems often present big opportunities. The challenge is that their solutions often require the collaborative efforts of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people from different organizations. The best way to make this happen is to provide platforms on which these people can engage with one another and invent new ways to create value for their organizations and themselves.

The first step in building such a “co-creation” system is to identify a large problem that everyone has an interest in. Then you should devise and test hypotheses about the segments of the community that need to be engaged, the platforms that will allow their members to connect in new ways, the interactions that will result, the experiences that members will get out of the interactions, and the value that could be generated to create a win for all.

A model for this is a work in progress that Becton, Dickinson and Company is orchestrating. A global leader in supplying syringes, BD is using co-creation to deepen its ties with hospital chains by helping them reduce the incidence of infections caused by unsafe injection and syringe-disposal practices.

All companies—even those in entirely B2B, brick-and-mortar industries—are now in a Facebook-like business. Their leaders have to be community organizers who strive to engage the customers, suppliers, employees, partners, citizens, and regulators that make up their ecosystems. A good way to do that is to provide those stakeholders with the means to connect with the company—and with one another—and encourage them to constantly invent new ways to create value for their organizations and themselves.

  • FG Francis Gouillart is president of the Experience Co-Creation Partnership, a management education and consulting firm in Concord, Massachusetts, and is co-author (with Venkat Ramaswamy) of the HBR article “Building the Co-Creative Enterprise” and the book The Power of Co-Creation .
  • DB Douglas Billings is a principal and the head of the co-creation practice at PwC.

Partner Center

U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

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.

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.

  • Publications
  • Account settings
  • Advanced Search
  • Journal List
  • J Urban Health
  • v.80(1); 2003 Mar

Logo of jurbhealth

Broadening participation in community problem solving: A multidisciplinary model to support collaborative practice and research

Roz d. lasker.

Center for the Advancement of Collaborative Strategies in Health, Division of Public Health, The New York Academy of Medicine, 1216 Fifth Avenue, Room 452, 10029-5293 New York, NY

Elisa S. Weiss

Over the last 40 years, thousands of communities—in the United States and internationally—have been working to broaden the involvement of people and organizations in addressing community-level problems related to health and other areas. Yet, in spite of, this experience, many communities are having substantial difficulty achieving their collaborative objective, and many funders of community partnerships and participation initiatives are looking for ways to get more out of their investment. One of the reasons we are in this predicament is that the practitioners and researchers who are interested in community collaboration come from a variety of contexts, initiatives, and academic disciplines, and few of them have integrated their work with experiences or literatures beyond their own domain. In this article, we seek to overcome some of this fragmentation of effort by presenting a multidisciplinary model that lays out the pathways by which broadly participatory processes lead to more effective community problem solving and to improvements in community health. The model, which builds on a broad array of practical experience as well as conceptual and empirical work in multiple fields, is an outgrowth of a joint-learning work group that was organized to support nine communities in the Turning Point initiative. Following a detailed explication of the model, the article focuses on the implications of the model for research, practice, and policy. It describes how the model can help researchers answer the fundamental effectiveness and “how-to” questions related to community collaboration. In addition, the article explores differences between the model and current practice, suggesting strategies that can help the participants in, and funders of, community collaborations strengthen their efforts.

The Full Text of this article is available as a PDF (185K).

Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

Book cover

Social Work Theory and Ethics pp 1–19 Cite as

Problem-Solving Theory: The Task-Centred Model

  • Blanca M. Ramos 5 &
  • Randall L. Stetson 6  
  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online: 12 April 2022

362 Accesses

Part of the Social Work book series (SOWO)

This chapter examines the task-centred model to illustrate the application of problem-solving theory for social work intervention. First, it provides a brief description of the problem-solving model. Its historical development and key principles and concepts are presented. Next, the chapter offers a general overview of the crisis intervention model. The task-centred model and crisis intervention share principles and methods drawn from problem-solving theory. The remainder of the chapter focuses on the task-centred model. It reviews its historical background, viability as a framework for social work generalist practice, as well as its applicability with diverse client populations and across cultural settings. The structured steps that guide task-centred implementation throughout the helping process are described. A brief critical review of the model’s strengths and limitations is provided. The chapter concludes with a brief summary and some closing thoughts.

  • Problem-solving theory
  • Task-centered model
  • Task-centered practice
  • Generalist social work practice
  • Crisis intervention
  • Multiculturalism

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution .

Brieland D (1977) Historical overview. Soc Work 22(5):341–346. http://www.jstor.org.libezproxy2.syr.edu/stable/23712810

Google Scholar  

Coady N, Lehmann P (2016) The problem-solving model: a framework for integrating the science and art of practice. In: Lehmann P, Coady N (eds) Theoretical perspectives for direct social work practice: a generalist-eclectic approach, 3rd edn. Springer

Chapter   Google Scholar  

D’Zurilla TJ, Goldfried MR (1971) Problem solving and behavior modification. J Abnorm Psychol 78(1):107–126. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0031360

Article   Google Scholar  

Dattilio F (1998) Cognitive behavioral therapy. In: Dattilio M (ed) Case studies in couple and family therapy: systems and cognitive perspectives. Guilford, New York, pp 62–82

Dohert W (1981) Cognitive processes in intimate conflicts: extending attribution theory. Am J Fam Ther 9:3–12

Duckword G (1967) A project in crisis intervention. Soc Casework 48(4):227–231

Fortune AE (2012) Development of the task-centered model. In: Rzepnicki TL, McCracken SG, Briggs HE (eds) From task-centered social work to evidence-based and integrative practice: reflections on history and implementation. Oxford University Press, pp 15–39

Fortune AE, Reid WJ (2011) Task-centered social work. In: Turner F (ed) Social work treatment: interlocking theoretical approaches, 6th edn. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 513–532

Fortune AE, McCallion P, Briar-Lawson K (Eds.) (2010) Social work practice research for the 21st century. New York: Columbia University Press

Fortune AE, Ramos BM, Reid WJ (2022) Task-Centered practice. In: Lisa Rapp-McCall, Kevin Corcoran & Albert R. Roberts, (eds.), Social workers’ desk reference, 4th edn Oxford University Press, New York

Fortune AE, Ramos BM, Reid WJ (2022) Task-Centered Practice. In: Lisa Rapp-McCall, Kevin Corcoran, Albert R Roberts, (Eds.). Social Workers’ Desk Reference, 4th edition. New York: Oxford University Press

Garfield SL (1994) Research on client variables in psychotherapy. In: Bergin A, Garfield S (eds) Handbook of psychotherapy and behavior change, 4th edn. Wiley, New York, pp 190–228

Golan N, Carey H, Hyttinnen E (1969) The emerging role of the social worker in the psychiatric emergency service. Community Ment Health J 5(1):55–61

Gorey KM, Thyer BA, Pawfuck DE (1998) Differential effectiveness of prevalent social work practice models: a meta-analysis. Soc Work 43:269–278

Hollis F (1970) The psychosocial approach to the practice of casework. In: Theories of social casework. University of Chicago Press, pp 33–75

Hoyt MF (2000) Some stories are better than others: doing what works in brief therapy and managed care. Brunner/Mazel, Philadelphia

Hubble M, Duncan B, Miller S (1999) Introduction. In: Hubble M, Duncan B, Miller S (eds) The heart and soul of change: what works in therapy. American Psychological Association, Washington, DC

Huh NS, Koh YS (2010) Task-centered practice in South Korea. In: Fortune AE, McCallion P, Briar-Lawson K (eds) Social work practice research for the 21st century. Columbia University Press, New York, pp 235–239

Jagt N, Jagt L (2010) Task-centered practice in the Netherlands. In: Fortune AE, McCallion P, Briar-Lawson K (eds) Social work practice research for the 21st century. Columbia University Press, New York, pp 208–212

Lo TW (2010) Task-centered practice in Hong Kong. In: Fortune AE, McCallion P, Briar-Lawson K (eds) Social work practice research for the 21st century. Columbia University Press, New York, pp 240–244

Malouff JM, Thorsteinsson EB, Schutte NS (2007) The efficacy of problem-solving therapy in reducing mental and physical health problems: a meta-analysis. Clin Psychol Rev 27(1):46–57

Marsh P (2010) Task-centered practice in Great Britain. In: Fortune AE, McCallion P, Briar-Lawson K (eds) Social work practice research for the 21st century. Columbia University Press, New York, pp 203–2007

Marsh P, Doel M (2005) The task-centred book. Routledge, Abingdon/New York

Book   Google Scholar  

Miley K, O’Melia M, DuBois (2017) Generalist social work practice: an empowering approach. Allyn & Bacon, Boston

Morris B (1968) Crisis intervention in a public welfare agency. Soc Casework 49(10):612–617

Naleppa M (2010) Task-centered practice in Germany. In: Fortune AE, McCallion P, Briar-Lawson K (eds) Social work practice research for the 21st century. Columbia University Press, New York, pp 213–216

Nezu AM, Nezu CM, D’Zurilla T (2012) Problem-solving therapy: a treatment manual. Springer

Nichols M, Schwartz R (2001) Family therapy. Allyn and Bacon, Needham Heights

Parad HJ (1958) Ego psychology and dynamic casework. Family Association of America, New York

Parad H (1965) Preventive casework: problems and implications. In: Parad H (ed) Crisis intervention: selected readings. Family Service Association of America, New York

Parad H (1966) The use of time-limited crisis interventions in community mental health programming. Soc Serv Rev 40(3):275–282

Parad H, Capland G (1960) A framework for studying families in crisis. Soc Work 5(3):3–15

Parad H, Parad G (1968) A study of crisis oriented planned short-term treatment. Soc Casework 49(6):346–355

Payne M (2014) Modern social work theory, 3rd edn. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke

Perlman HH (1957) Social casework: a problem-solving process. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Poal P (1990) Introduction to the theory and practice of crisis intervention. Quadernos Psicol 10:121–140

Ramos BM, Garvin C (2003) Task centered treatment with culturally diverse populations. In: Tolson E, Reid W, Garvin C (eds) Generalist practice: a task centered approach, pp. Columbia University Press, New York, pp 441–463

Ramos B, Tolson E (2016) The task-centered model. In: Lehmann P, Coady N (eds) Theoretical perspectives for direct social work practice: a generalist-eclectic approach, 3rd edn. Springer

Regehr C (2017) Crisis theory and social work treatment. In: Turner F (ed) Social work treatment: interlocking theoretical approaches. Oxford University Press

Reid WJ (1992) Task strategies: an empirical approach to social work practice. Columbia University Press, New York

Reid WJ, Epstein L (eds) (1972) Task-centered casework. Columbia University Press, New York

Reid W, Ramos B (2002) Intervención “Centrada en la Tarea”, un Modelo de Práctica de Trabajo Social. Rev Treball Soc 168:6–22

Reid WJ, Shyne AW (1969) Brief and extended casework. Columbia University Press, New York

Roberts A (2005) Bridging the past and present to the future of crisis intervention and case management. In: Roberts A (ed) Crisis intervention handbook: assessment, treatment, and research, 3rd edn. Oxford University Press

Rooney RH (2010) Task-centered practice in the United States. In: Fortune AE, McCallion P, Briar-Lawson K (eds) Social work practice research for the 21st century. Columbia University Press, New York, pp 195–202

Ruben D (1998) Social exchange theory: dynamics of a system governing the dysfunctional family and guide to assessment. J Contemp Psychother 8(3):307–325

Schatz MS, Jenkins LE, Sheafor BW (1990) Milford redefined: a model of initial and advanced generalist social work [Article]. J Soc Work Educ 26(3):217–231. https://doi.org/10.1080/10437797.1990.10672154

Strean HS (1968) Some reactions of case workers to the war on poverty. J Contemp Psychother 1:43–48

Strickler M (1965) Applying crisis theory in a community clinic. Soc Casework 46:150–154

Studt E (1968) Social work theory and implication for the practice of methods. Soc Work Educ Report 16:22–46

Tolson R, Reid W, Garvin C (2003) Generalist practice: a task-centered approach, 2nd edn. Columbia University Press, New York

Trotter C (2010) Task-centred practice in Australia. In Fortune AE, McCallion P, Briar-Lawson K (Eds.), Social work practice research for the 21st century, 235–239. New York: Columbia University Press

Watzlawick P, Bervin J, Jackson D (1967) Pragmatics of human communication. W.W. Norton, New York

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

State University of New York at Albany, Albany, NY, USA

Blanca M. Ramos

State University of New York at Oswego, Oswego, NY, USA

Randall L. Stetson

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Blanca M. Ramos .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

School of Human Services and Social Work, Griffith University, Meadowbrook, QLD, Australia

Dorothee Hölscher

School of Social Sciences, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Richard Hugman

Donna McAuliffe

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

About this entry

Cite this entry.

Ramos, B.M., Stetson, R.L. (2022). Problem-Solving Theory: The Task-Centred Model. In: Hölscher, D., Hugman, R., McAuliffe, D. (eds) Social Work Theory and Ethics. Social Work. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3059-0_9-1

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3059-0_9-1

Received : 24 December 2021

Accepted : 25 January 2022

Published : 12 April 2022

Publisher Name : Springer, Singapore

Print ISBN : 978-981-16-3059-0

Online ISBN : 978-981-16-3059-0

eBook Packages : Social Sciences Reference Module Humanities and Social Sciences Reference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

  • Publish with us

Policies and ethics

  • Find a journal
  • Track your research

Go to Charlotte.edu

Prospective Students

  • About UNC Charlotte
  • Campus Life
  • Graduate Admissions

Faculty and Staff

  • Human Resources
  • Auxiliary Services
  • Inside UNC Charlotte
  • Academic Affairs

Current Students

  • Financial Aid
  • Student Health

Alumni and Friends

  • Alumni Association
  • Advancement
  • Make a Gift

Understanding Community Needs based on Community Perspectives

Understanding community needs based on community perspectives:.

Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) – Historically, university researchers have used a “needs assessment approach” or a “deficiency model” as their approach to engaging communities around problem solving. An unintended consequence is that communities (and university researchers) can wind up viewing themselves as having overwhelming problems that can only be solved by outside experts and external resources. An alternate approach, developed by John L. McKnight and John Kertzmann from the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University, is to develop partnerships, programs and policies based on “the capacities, skills and assets” of the people and their local communities. The ARCHES backbone support organization utilizes this approach to community assessment because:

Successful community-engaged problem solving only occurs when local people are actively involved and leading the initiatives, committing themselves and their resources to the effort.

The approach is consistent with the principles of Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) whereby community members participate with researches in solving community problems identified by the community – community members themselves are best-equipped to identify and prioritize the issues that are important to them, and to then collaborate to develop sustainable solutions.

Community development and change must begin from within, building on the resources which the community members already control, while working to acquire those additional resources that are not yet available.

problem solving approach in community

35 problem-solving techniques and methods for solving complex problems

Problem solving workshop

Design your next session with SessionLab

Join the 150,000+ facilitators 
using SessionLab.

Recommended Articles

A step-by-step guide to planning a workshop, how to create an unforgettable training session in 8 simple steps, 47 useful online tools for workshop planning and meeting facilitation.

All teams and organizations encounter challenges as they grow. There are problems that might occur for teams when it comes to miscommunication or resolving business-critical issues . You may face challenges around growth , design , user engagement, and even team culture and happiness. In short, problem-solving techniques should be part of every team’s skillset.

Problem-solving methods are primarily designed to help a group or team through a process of first identifying problems and challenges , ideating possible solutions , and then evaluating the most suitable .

Finding effective solutions to complex problems isn’t easy, but by using the right process and techniques, you can help your team be more efficient in the process.

So how do you develop strategies that are engaging, and empower your team to solve problems effectively?

In this blog post, we share a series of problem-solving tools you can use in your next workshop or team meeting. You’ll also find some tips for facilitating the process and how to enable others to solve complex problems.

Let’s get started! 

How do you identify problems?

How do you identify the right solution.

  • Tips for more effective problem-solving

Complete problem-solving methods

  • Problem-solving techniques to identify and analyze problems
  • Problem-solving techniques for developing solutions

Problem-solving warm-up activities

Closing activities for a problem-solving process.

Before you can move towards finding the right solution for a given problem, you first need to identify and define the problem you wish to solve. 

Here, you want to clearly articulate what the problem is and allow your group to do the same. Remember that everyone in a group is likely to have differing perspectives and alignment is necessary in order to help the group move forward. 

Identifying a problem accurately also requires that all members of a group are able to contribute their views in an open and safe manner. It can be scary for people to stand up and contribute, especially if the problems or challenges are emotive or personal in nature. Be sure to try and create a psychologically safe space for these kinds of discussions.

Remember that problem analysis and further discussion are also important. Not taking the time to fully analyze and discuss a challenge can result in the development of solutions that are not fit for purpose or do not address the underlying issue.

Successfully identifying and then analyzing a problem means facilitating a group through activities designed to help them clearly and honestly articulate their thoughts and produce usable insight.

With this data, you might then produce a problem statement that clearly describes the problem you wish to be addressed and also state the goal of any process you undertake to tackle this issue.  

Finding solutions is the end goal of any process. Complex organizational challenges can only be solved with an appropriate solution but discovering them requires using the right problem-solving tool.

After you’ve explored a problem and discussed ideas, you need to help a team discuss and choose the right solution. Consensus tools and methods such as those below help a group explore possible solutions before then voting for the best. They’re a great way to tap into the collective intelligence of the group for great results!

Remember that the process is often iterative. Great problem solvers often roadtest a viable solution in a measured way to see what works too. While you might not get the right solution on your first try, the methods below help teams land on the most likely to succeed solution while also holding space for improvement.

Every effective problem solving process begins with an agenda . A well-structured workshop is one of the best methods for successfully guiding a group from exploring a problem to implementing a solution.

In SessionLab, it’s easy to go from an idea to a complete agenda . Start by dragging and dropping your core problem solving activities into place . Add timings, breaks and necessary materials before sharing your agenda with your colleagues.

The resulting agenda will be your guide to an effective and productive problem solving session that will also help you stay organized on the day!

problem solving approach in community

Tips for more effective problem solving

Problem-solving activities are only one part of the puzzle. While a great method can help unlock your team’s ability to solve problems, without a thoughtful approach and strong facilitation the solutions may not be fit for purpose.

Let’s take a look at some problem-solving tips you can apply to any process to help it be a success!

Clearly define the problem

Jumping straight to solutions can be tempting, though without first clearly articulating a problem, the solution might not be the right one. Many of the problem-solving activities below include sections where the problem is explored and clearly defined before moving on.

This is a vital part of the problem-solving process and taking the time to fully define an issue can save time and effort later. A clear definition helps identify irrelevant information and it also ensures that your team sets off on the right track.

Don’t jump to conclusions

It’s easy for groups to exhibit cognitive bias or have preconceived ideas about both problems and potential solutions. Be sure to back up any problem statements or potential solutions with facts, research, and adequate forethought.

The best techniques ask participants to be methodical and challenge preconceived notions. Make sure you give the group enough time and space to collect relevant information and consider the problem in a new way. By approaching the process with a clear, rational mindset, you’ll often find that better solutions are more forthcoming.  

Try different approaches  

Problems come in all shapes and sizes and so too should the methods you use to solve them. If you find that one approach isn’t yielding results and your team isn’t finding different solutions, try mixing it up. You’ll be surprised at how using a new creative activity can unblock your team and generate great solutions.

Don’t take it personally 

Depending on the nature of your team or organizational problems, it’s easy for conversations to get heated. While it’s good for participants to be engaged in the discussions, ensure that emotions don’t run too high and that blame isn’t thrown around while finding solutions.

You’re all in it together, and even if your team or area is seeing problems, that isn’t necessarily a disparagement of you personally. Using facilitation skills to manage group dynamics is one effective method of helping conversations be more constructive.

Get the right people in the room

Your problem-solving method is often only as effective as the group using it. Getting the right people on the job and managing the number of people present is important too!

If the group is too small, you may not get enough different perspectives to effectively solve a problem. If the group is too large, you can go round and round during the ideation stages.

Creating the right group makeup is also important in ensuring you have the necessary expertise and skillset to both identify and follow up on potential solutions. Carefully consider who to include at each stage to help ensure your problem-solving method is followed and positioned for success.

Document everything

The best solutions can take refinement, iteration, and reflection to come out. Get into a habit of documenting your process in order to keep all the learnings from the session and to allow ideas to mature and develop. Many of the methods below involve the creation of documents or shared resources. Be sure to keep and share these so everyone can benefit from the work done!

Bring a facilitator 

Facilitation is all about making group processes easier. With a subject as potentially emotive and important as problem-solving, having an impartial third party in the form of a facilitator can make all the difference in finding great solutions and keeping the process moving. Consider bringing a facilitator to your problem-solving session to get better results and generate meaningful solutions!

Develop your problem-solving skills

It takes time and practice to be an effective problem solver. While some roles or participants might more naturally gravitate towards problem-solving, it can take development and planning to help everyone create better solutions.

You might develop a training program, run a problem-solving workshop or simply ask your team to practice using the techniques below. Check out our post on problem-solving skills to see how you and your group can develop the right mental process and be more resilient to issues too!

Design a great agenda

Workshops are a great format for solving problems. With the right approach, you can focus a group and help them find the solutions to their own problems. But designing a process can be time-consuming and finding the right activities can be difficult.

Check out our workshop planning guide to level-up your agenda design and start running more effective workshops. Need inspiration? Check out templates designed by expert facilitators to help you kickstart your process!

In this section, we’ll look at in-depth problem-solving methods that provide a complete end-to-end process for developing effective solutions. These will help guide your team from the discovery and definition of a problem through to delivering the right solution.

If you’re looking for an all-encompassing method or problem-solving model, these processes are a great place to start. They’ll ask your team to challenge preconceived ideas and adopt a mindset for solving problems more effectively.

  • Six Thinking Hats
  • Lightning Decision Jam
  • Problem Definition Process
  • Discovery & Action Dialogue
Design Sprint 2.0
  • Open Space Technology

1. Six Thinking Hats

Individual approaches to solving a problem can be very different based on what team or role an individual holds. It can be easy for existing biases or perspectives to find their way into the mix, or for internal politics to direct a conversation.

Six Thinking Hats is a classic method for identifying the problems that need to be solved and enables your team to consider them from different angles, whether that is by focusing on facts and data, creative solutions, or by considering why a particular solution might not work.

Like all problem-solving frameworks, Six Thinking Hats is effective at helping teams remove roadblocks from a conversation or discussion and come to terms with all the aspects necessary to solve complex problems.

2. Lightning Decision Jam

Featured courtesy of Jonathan Courtney of AJ&Smart Berlin, Lightning Decision Jam is one of those strategies that should be in every facilitation toolbox. Exploring problems and finding solutions is often creative in nature, though as with any creative process, there is the potential to lose focus and get lost.

Unstructured discussions might get you there in the end, but it’s much more effective to use a method that creates a clear process and team focus.

In Lightning Decision Jam, participants are invited to begin by writing challenges, concerns, or mistakes on post-its without discussing them before then being invited by the moderator to present them to the group.

From there, the team vote on which problems to solve and are guided through steps that will allow them to reframe those problems, create solutions and then decide what to execute on. 

By deciding the problems that need to be solved as a team before moving on, this group process is great for ensuring the whole team is aligned and can take ownership over the next stages. 

Lightning Decision Jam (LDJ)   #action   #decision making   #problem solving   #issue analysis   #innovation   #design   #remote-friendly   The problem with anything that requires creative thinking is that it’s easy to get lost—lose focus and fall into the trap of having useless, open-ended, unstructured discussions. Here’s the most effective solution I’ve found: Replace all open, unstructured discussion with a clear process. What to use this exercise for: Anything which requires a group of people to make decisions, solve problems or discuss challenges. It’s always good to frame an LDJ session with a broad topic, here are some examples: The conversion flow of our checkout Our internal design process How we organise events Keeping up with our competition Improving sales flow

3. Problem Definition Process

While problems can be complex, the problem-solving methods you use to identify and solve those problems can often be simple in design. 

By taking the time to truly identify and define a problem before asking the group to reframe the challenge as an opportunity, this method is a great way to enable change.

Begin by identifying a focus question and exploring the ways in which it manifests before splitting into five teams who will each consider the problem using a different method: escape, reversal, exaggeration, distortion or wishful. Teams develop a problem objective and create ideas in line with their method before then feeding them back to the group.

This method is great for enabling in-depth discussions while also creating space for finding creative solutions too!

Problem Definition   #problem solving   #idea generation   #creativity   #online   #remote-friendly   A problem solving technique to define a problem, challenge or opportunity and to generate ideas.

4. The 5 Whys 

Sometimes, a group needs to go further with their strategies and analyze the root cause at the heart of organizational issues. An RCA or root cause analysis is the process of identifying what is at the heart of business problems or recurring challenges. 

The 5 Whys is a simple and effective method of helping a group go find the root cause of any problem or challenge and conduct analysis that will deliver results. 

By beginning with the creation of a problem statement and going through five stages to refine it, The 5 Whys provides everything you need to truly discover the cause of an issue.

The 5 Whys   #hyperisland   #innovation   This simple and powerful method is useful for getting to the core of a problem or challenge. As the title suggests, the group defines a problems, then asks the question “why” five times, often using the resulting explanation as a starting point for creative problem solving.

5. World Cafe

World Cafe is a simple but powerful facilitation technique to help bigger groups to focus their energy and attention on solving complex problems.

World Cafe enables this approach by creating a relaxed atmosphere where participants are able to self-organize and explore topics relevant and important to them which are themed around a central problem-solving purpose. Create the right atmosphere by modeling your space after a cafe and after guiding the group through the method, let them take the lead!

Making problem-solving a part of your organization’s culture in the long term can be a difficult undertaking. More approachable formats like World Cafe can be especially effective in bringing people unfamiliar with workshops into the fold. 

World Cafe   #hyperisland   #innovation   #issue analysis   World Café is a simple yet powerful method, originated by Juanita Brown, for enabling meaningful conversations driven completely by participants and the topics that are relevant and important to them. Facilitators create a cafe-style space and provide simple guidelines. Participants then self-organize and explore a set of relevant topics or questions for conversation.

6. Discovery & Action Dialogue (DAD)

One of the best approaches is to create a safe space for a group to share and discover practices and behaviors that can help them find their own solutions.

With DAD, you can help a group choose which problems they wish to solve and which approaches they will take to do so. It’s great at helping remove resistance to change and can help get buy-in at every level too!

This process of enabling frontline ownership is great in ensuring follow-through and is one of the methods you will want in your toolbox as a facilitator.

Discovery & Action Dialogue (DAD)   #idea generation   #liberating structures   #action   #issue analysis   #remote-friendly   DADs make it easy for a group or community to discover practices and behaviors that enable some individuals (without access to special resources and facing the same constraints) to find better solutions than their peers to common problems. These are called positive deviant (PD) behaviors and practices. DADs make it possible for people in the group, unit, or community to discover by themselves these PD practices. DADs also create favorable conditions for stimulating participants’ creativity in spaces where they can feel safe to invent new and more effective practices. Resistance to change evaporates as participants are unleashed to choose freely which practices they will adopt or try and which problems they will tackle. DADs make it possible to achieve frontline ownership of solutions.

7. Design Sprint 2.0

Want to see how a team can solve big problems and move forward with prototyping and testing solutions in a few days? The Design Sprint 2.0 template from Jake Knapp, author of Sprint, is a complete agenda for a with proven results.

Developing the right agenda can involve difficult but necessary planning. Ensuring all the correct steps are followed can also be stressful or time-consuming depending on your level of experience.

Use this complete 4-day workshop template if you are finding there is no obvious solution to your challenge and want to focus your team around a specific problem that might require a shortcut to launching a minimum viable product or waiting for the organization-wide implementation of a solution.

8. Open space technology

Open space technology- developed by Harrison Owen – creates a space where large groups are invited to take ownership of their problem solving and lead individual sessions. Open space technology is a great format when you have a great deal of expertise and insight in the room and want to allow for different takes and approaches on a particular theme or problem you need to be solved.

Start by bringing your participants together to align around a central theme and focus their efforts. Explain the ground rules to help guide the problem-solving process and then invite members to identify any issue connecting to the central theme that they are interested in and are prepared to take responsibility for.

Once participants have decided on their approach to the core theme, they write their issue on a piece of paper, announce it to the group, pick a session time and place, and post the paper on the wall. As the wall fills up with sessions, the group is then invited to join the sessions that interest them the most and which they can contribute to, then you’re ready to begin!

Everyone joins the problem-solving group they’ve signed up to, record the discussion and if appropriate, findings can then be shared with the rest of the group afterward.

Open Space Technology   #action plan   #idea generation   #problem solving   #issue analysis   #large group   #online   #remote-friendly   Open Space is a methodology for large groups to create their agenda discerning important topics for discussion, suitable for conferences, community gatherings and whole system facilitation

Techniques to identify and analyze problems

Using a problem-solving method to help a team identify and analyze a problem can be a quick and effective addition to any workshop or meeting.

While further actions are always necessary, you can generate momentum and alignment easily, and these activities are a great place to get started.

We’ve put together this list of techniques to help you and your team with problem identification, analysis, and discussion that sets the foundation for developing effective solutions.

Let’s take a look!

  • The Creativity Dice
  • Fishbone Analysis
  • Problem Tree
  • SWOT Analysis
  • Agreement-Certainty Matrix
  • The Journalistic Six
  • LEGO Challenge
  • What, So What, Now What?
  • Journalists

Individual and group perspectives are incredibly important, but what happens if people are set in their minds and need a change of perspective in order to approach a problem more effectively?

Flip It is a method we love because it is both simple to understand and run, and allows groups to understand how their perspectives and biases are formed. 

Participants in Flip It are first invited to consider concerns, issues, or problems from a perspective of fear and write them on a flip chart. Then, the group is asked to consider those same issues from a perspective of hope and flip their understanding.  

No problem and solution is free from existing bias and by changing perspectives with Flip It, you can then develop a problem solving model quickly and effectively.

Flip It!   #gamestorming   #problem solving   #action   Often, a change in a problem or situation comes simply from a change in our perspectives. Flip It! is a quick game designed to show players that perspectives are made, not born.

10. The Creativity Dice

One of the most useful problem solving skills you can teach your team is of approaching challenges with creativity, flexibility, and openness. Games like The Creativity Dice allow teams to overcome the potential hurdle of too much linear thinking and approach the process with a sense of fun and speed. 

In The Creativity Dice, participants are organized around a topic and roll a dice to determine what they will work on for a period of 3 minutes at a time. They might roll a 3 and work on investigating factual information on the chosen topic. They might roll a 1 and work on identifying the specific goals, standards, or criteria for the session.

Encouraging rapid work and iteration while asking participants to be flexible are great skills to cultivate. Having a stage for idea incubation in this game is also important. Moments of pause can help ensure the ideas that are put forward are the most suitable. 

The Creativity Dice   #creativity   #problem solving   #thiagi   #issue analysis   Too much linear thinking is hazardous to creative problem solving. To be creative, you should approach the problem (or the opportunity) from different points of view. You should leave a thought hanging in mid-air and move to another. This skipping around prevents premature closure and lets your brain incubate one line of thought while you consciously pursue another.

11. Fishbone Analysis

Organizational or team challenges are rarely simple, and it’s important to remember that one problem can be an indication of something that goes deeper and may require further consideration to be solved.

Fishbone Analysis helps groups to dig deeper and understand the origins of a problem. It’s a great example of a root cause analysis method that is simple for everyone on a team to get their head around. 

Participants in this activity are asked to annotate a diagram of a fish, first adding the problem or issue to be worked on at the head of a fish before then brainstorming the root causes of the problem and adding them as bones on the fish. 

Using abstractions such as a diagram of a fish can really help a team break out of their regular thinking and develop a creative approach.

Fishbone Analysis   #problem solving   ##root cause analysis   #decision making   #online facilitation   A process to help identify and understand the origins of problems, issues or observations.

12. Problem Tree 

Encouraging visual thinking can be an essential part of many strategies. By simply reframing and clarifying problems, a group can move towards developing a problem solving model that works for them. 

In Problem Tree, groups are asked to first brainstorm a list of problems – these can be design problems, team problems or larger business problems – and then organize them into a hierarchy. The hierarchy could be from most important to least important or abstract to practical, though the key thing with problem solving games that involve this aspect is that your group has some way of managing and sorting all the issues that are raised.

Once you have a list of problems that need to be solved and have organized them accordingly, you’re then well-positioned for the next problem solving steps.

Problem tree   #define intentions   #create   #design   #issue analysis   A problem tree is a tool to clarify the hierarchy of problems addressed by the team within a design project; it represents high level problems or related sublevel problems.

13. SWOT Analysis

Chances are you’ve heard of the SWOT Analysis before. This problem-solving method focuses on identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats is a tried and tested method for both individuals and teams.

Start by creating a desired end state or outcome and bare this in mind – any process solving model is made more effective by knowing what you are moving towards. Create a quadrant made up of the four categories of a SWOT analysis and ask participants to generate ideas based on each of those quadrants.

Once you have those ideas assembled in their quadrants, cluster them together based on their affinity with other ideas. These clusters are then used to facilitate group conversations and move things forward. 

SWOT analysis   #gamestorming   #problem solving   #action   #meeting facilitation   The SWOT Analysis is a long-standing technique of looking at what we have, with respect to the desired end state, as well as what we could improve on. It gives us an opportunity to gauge approaching opportunities and dangers, and assess the seriousness of the conditions that affect our future. When we understand those conditions, we can influence what comes next.

14. Agreement-Certainty Matrix

Not every problem-solving approach is right for every challenge, and deciding on the right method for the challenge at hand is a key part of being an effective team.

The Agreement Certainty matrix helps teams align on the nature of the challenges facing them. By sorting problems from simple to chaotic, your team can understand what methods are suitable for each problem and what they can do to ensure effective results. 

If you are already using Liberating Structures techniques as part of your problem-solving strategy, the Agreement-Certainty Matrix can be an invaluable addition to your process. We’ve found it particularly if you are having issues with recurring problems in your organization and want to go deeper in understanding the root cause. 

Agreement-Certainty Matrix   #issue analysis   #liberating structures   #problem solving   You can help individuals or groups avoid the frequent mistake of trying to solve a problem with methods that are not adapted to the nature of their challenge. The combination of two questions makes it possible to easily sort challenges into four categories: simple, complicated, complex , and chaotic .  A problem is simple when it can be solved reliably with practices that are easy to duplicate.  It is complicated when experts are required to devise a sophisticated solution that will yield the desired results predictably.  A problem is complex when there are several valid ways to proceed but outcomes are not predictable in detail.  Chaotic is when the context is too turbulent to identify a path forward.  A loose analogy may be used to describe these differences: simple is like following a recipe, complicated like sending a rocket to the moon, complex like raising a child, and chaotic is like the game “Pin the Tail on the Donkey.”  The Liberating Structures Matching Matrix in Chapter 5 can be used as the first step to clarify the nature of a challenge and avoid the mismatches between problems and solutions that are frequently at the root of chronic, recurring problems.

Organizing and charting a team’s progress can be important in ensuring its success. SQUID (Sequential Question and Insight Diagram) is a great model that allows a team to effectively switch between giving questions and answers and develop the skills they need to stay on track throughout the process. 

Begin with two different colored sticky notes – one for questions and one for answers – and with your central topic (the head of the squid) on the board. Ask the group to first come up with a series of questions connected to their best guess of how to approach the topic. Ask the group to come up with answers to those questions, fix them to the board and connect them with a line. After some discussion, go back to question mode by responding to the generated answers or other points on the board.

It’s rewarding to see a diagram grow throughout the exercise, and a completed SQUID can provide a visual resource for future effort and as an example for other teams.

SQUID   #gamestorming   #project planning   #issue analysis   #problem solving   When exploring an information space, it’s important for a group to know where they are at any given time. By using SQUID, a group charts out the territory as they go and can navigate accordingly. SQUID stands for Sequential Question and Insight Diagram.

16. Speed Boat

To continue with our nautical theme, Speed Boat is a short and sweet activity that can help a team quickly identify what employees, clients or service users might have a problem with and analyze what might be standing in the way of achieving a solution.

Methods that allow for a group to make observations, have insights and obtain those eureka moments quickly are invaluable when trying to solve complex problems.

In Speed Boat, the approach is to first consider what anchors and challenges might be holding an organization (or boat) back. Bonus points if you are able to identify any sharks in the water and develop ideas that can also deal with competitors!   

Speed Boat   #gamestorming   #problem solving   #action   Speedboat is a short and sweet way to identify what your employees or clients don’t like about your product/service or what’s standing in the way of a desired goal.

17. The Journalistic Six

Some of the most effective ways of solving problems is by encouraging teams to be more inclusive and diverse in their thinking.

Based on the six key questions journalism students are taught to answer in articles and news stories, The Journalistic Six helps create teams to see the whole picture. By using who, what, when, where, why, and how to facilitate the conversation and encourage creative thinking, your team can make sure that the problem identification and problem analysis stages of the are covered exhaustively and thoughtfully. Reporter’s notebook and dictaphone optional.

The Journalistic Six – Who What When Where Why How   #idea generation   #issue analysis   #problem solving   #online   #creative thinking   #remote-friendly   A questioning method for generating, explaining, investigating ideas.

18. LEGO Challenge

Now for an activity that is a little out of the (toy) box. LEGO Serious Play is a facilitation methodology that can be used to improve creative thinking and problem-solving skills. 

The LEGO Challenge includes giving each member of the team an assignment that is hidden from the rest of the group while they create a structure without speaking.

What the LEGO challenge brings to the table is a fun working example of working with stakeholders who might not be on the same page to solve problems. Also, it’s LEGO! Who doesn’t love LEGO! 

LEGO Challenge   #hyperisland   #team   A team-building activity in which groups must work together to build a structure out of LEGO, but each individual has a secret “assignment” which makes the collaborative process more challenging. It emphasizes group communication, leadership dynamics, conflict, cooperation, patience and problem solving strategy.

19. What, So What, Now What?

If not carefully managed, the problem identification and problem analysis stages of the problem-solving process can actually create more problems and misunderstandings.

The What, So What, Now What? problem-solving activity is designed to help collect insights and move forward while also eliminating the possibility of disagreement when it comes to identifying, clarifying, and analyzing organizational or work problems. 

Facilitation is all about bringing groups together so that might work on a shared goal and the best problem-solving strategies ensure that teams are aligned in purpose, if not initially in opinion or insight.

Throughout the three steps of this game, you give everyone on a team to reflect on a problem by asking what happened, why it is important, and what actions should then be taken. 

This can be a great activity for bringing our individual perceptions about a problem or challenge and contextualizing it in a larger group setting. This is one of the most important problem-solving skills you can bring to your organization.

W³ – What, So What, Now What?   #issue analysis   #innovation   #liberating structures   You can help groups reflect on a shared experience in a way that builds understanding and spurs coordinated action while avoiding unproductive conflict. It is possible for every voice to be heard while simultaneously sifting for insights and shaping new direction. Progressing in stages makes this practical—from collecting facts about What Happened to making sense of these facts with So What and finally to what actions logically follow with Now What . The shared progression eliminates most of the misunderstandings that otherwise fuel disagreements about what to do. Voila!

20. Journalists  

Problem analysis can be one of the most important and decisive stages of all problem-solving tools. Sometimes, a team can become bogged down in the details and are unable to move forward.

Journalists is an activity that can avoid a group from getting stuck in the problem identification or problem analysis stages of the process.

In Journalists, the group is invited to draft the front page of a fictional newspaper and figure out what stories deserve to be on the cover and what headlines those stories will have. By reframing how your problems and challenges are approached, you can help a team move productively through the process and be better prepared for the steps to follow.

Journalists   #vision   #big picture   #issue analysis   #remote-friendly   This is an exercise to use when the group gets stuck in details and struggles to see the big picture. Also good for defining a vision.

Problem-solving techniques for developing solutions 

The success of any problem-solving process can be measured by the solutions it produces. After you’ve defined the issue, explored existing ideas, and ideated, it’s time to narrow down to the correct solution.

Use these problem-solving techniques when you want to help your team find consensus, compare possible solutions, and move towards taking action on a particular problem.

  • Improved Solutions
  • Four-Step Sketch
  • 15% Solutions
  • How-Now-Wow matrix
  • Impact Effort Matrix

21. Mindspin  

Brainstorming is part of the bread and butter of the problem-solving process and all problem-solving strategies benefit from getting ideas out and challenging a team to generate solutions quickly. 

With Mindspin, participants are encouraged not only to generate ideas but to do so under time constraints and by slamming down cards and passing them on. By doing multiple rounds, your team can begin with a free generation of possible solutions before moving on to developing those solutions and encouraging further ideation. 

This is one of our favorite problem-solving activities and can be great for keeping the energy up throughout the workshop. Remember the importance of helping people become engaged in the process – energizing problem-solving techniques like Mindspin can help ensure your team stays engaged and happy, even when the problems they’re coming together to solve are complex. 

MindSpin   #teampedia   #idea generation   #problem solving   #action   A fast and loud method to enhance brainstorming within a team. Since this activity has more than round ideas that are repetitive can be ruled out leaving more creative and innovative answers to the challenge.

22. Improved Solutions

After a team has successfully identified a problem and come up with a few solutions, it can be tempting to call the work of the problem-solving process complete. That said, the first solution is not necessarily the best, and by including a further review and reflection activity into your problem-solving model, you can ensure your group reaches the best possible result. 

One of a number of problem-solving games from Thiagi Group, Improved Solutions helps you go the extra mile and develop suggested solutions with close consideration and peer review. By supporting the discussion of several problems at once and by shifting team roles throughout, this problem-solving technique is a dynamic way of finding the best solution. 

Improved Solutions   #creativity   #thiagi   #problem solving   #action   #team   You can improve any solution by objectively reviewing its strengths and weaknesses and making suitable adjustments. In this creativity framegame, you improve the solutions to several problems. To maintain objective detachment, you deal with a different problem during each of six rounds and assume different roles (problem owner, consultant, basher, booster, enhancer, and evaluator) during each round. At the conclusion of the activity, each player ends up with two solutions to her problem.

23. Four Step Sketch

Creative thinking and visual ideation does not need to be confined to the opening stages of your problem-solving strategies. Exercises that include sketching and prototyping on paper can be effective at the solution finding and development stage of the process, and can be great for keeping a team engaged. 

By going from simple notes to a crazy 8s round that involves rapidly sketching 8 variations on their ideas before then producing a final solution sketch, the group is able to iterate quickly and visually. Problem-solving techniques like Four-Step Sketch are great if you have a group of different thinkers and want to change things up from a more textual or discussion-based approach.

Four-Step Sketch   #design sprint   #innovation   #idea generation   #remote-friendly   The four-step sketch is an exercise that helps people to create well-formed concepts through a structured process that includes: Review key information Start design work on paper,  Consider multiple variations , Create a detailed solution . This exercise is preceded by a set of other activities allowing the group to clarify the challenge they want to solve. See how the Four Step Sketch exercise fits into a Design Sprint

24. 15% Solutions

Some problems are simpler than others and with the right problem-solving activities, you can empower people to take immediate actions that can help create organizational change. 

Part of the liberating structures toolkit, 15% solutions is a problem-solving technique that focuses on finding and implementing solutions quickly. A process of iterating and making small changes quickly can help generate momentum and an appetite for solving complex problems.

Problem-solving strategies can live and die on whether people are onboard. Getting some quick wins is a great way of getting people behind the process.   

It can be extremely empowering for a team to realize that problem-solving techniques can be deployed quickly and easily and delineate between things they can positively impact and those things they cannot change. 

15% Solutions   #action   #liberating structures   #remote-friendly   You can reveal the actions, however small, that everyone can do immediately. At a minimum, these will create momentum, and that may make a BIG difference.  15% Solutions show that there is no reason to wait around, feel powerless, or fearful. They help people pick it up a level. They get individuals and the group to focus on what is within their discretion instead of what they cannot change.  With a very simple question, you can flip the conversation to what can be done and find solutions to big problems that are often distributed widely in places not known in advance. Shifting a few grains of sand may trigger a landslide and change the whole landscape.

25. How-Now-Wow Matrix

The problem-solving process is often creative, as complex problems usually require a change of thinking and creative response in order to find the best solutions. While it’s common for the first stages to encourage creative thinking, groups can often gravitate to familiar solutions when it comes to the end of the process. 

When selecting solutions, you don’t want to lose your creative energy! The How-Now-Wow Matrix from Gamestorming is a great problem-solving activity that enables a group to stay creative and think out of the box when it comes to selecting the right solution for a given problem.

Problem-solving techniques that encourage creative thinking and the ideation and selection of new solutions can be the most effective in organisational change. Give the How-Now-Wow Matrix a go, and not just for how pleasant it is to say out loud. 

How-Now-Wow Matrix   #gamestorming   #idea generation   #remote-friendly   When people want to develop new ideas, they most often think out of the box in the brainstorming or divergent phase. However, when it comes to convergence, people often end up picking ideas that are most familiar to them. This is called a ‘creative paradox’ or a ‘creadox’. The How-Now-Wow matrix is an idea selection tool that breaks the creadox by forcing people to weigh each idea on 2 parameters.

26. Impact and Effort Matrix

All problem-solving techniques hope to not only find solutions to a given problem or challenge but to find the best solution. When it comes to finding a solution, groups are invited to put on their decision-making hats and really think about how a proposed idea would work in practice. 

The Impact and Effort Matrix is one of the problem-solving techniques that fall into this camp, empowering participants to first generate ideas and then categorize them into a 2×2 matrix based on impact and effort.

Activities that invite critical thinking while remaining simple are invaluable. Use the Impact and Effort Matrix to move from ideation and towards evaluating potential solutions before then committing to them. 

Impact and Effort Matrix   #gamestorming   #decision making   #action   #remote-friendly   In this decision-making exercise, possible actions are mapped based on two factors: effort required to implement and potential impact. Categorizing ideas along these lines is a useful technique in decision making, as it obliges contributors to balance and evaluate suggested actions before committing to them.

27. Dotmocracy

If you’ve followed each of the problem-solving steps with your group successfully, you should move towards the end of your process with heaps of possible solutions developed with a specific problem in mind. But how do you help a group go from ideation to putting a solution into action? 

Dotmocracy – or Dot Voting -is a tried and tested method of helping a team in the problem-solving process make decisions and put actions in place with a degree of oversight and consensus. 

One of the problem-solving techniques that should be in every facilitator’s toolbox, Dot Voting is fast and effective and can help identify the most popular and best solutions and help bring a group to a decision effectively. 

Dotmocracy   #action   #decision making   #group prioritization   #hyperisland   #remote-friendly   Dotmocracy is a simple method for group prioritization or decision-making. It is not an activity on its own, but a method to use in processes where prioritization or decision-making is the aim. The method supports a group to quickly see which options are most popular or relevant. The options or ideas are written on post-its and stuck up on a wall for the whole group to see. Each person votes for the options they think are the strongest, and that information is used to inform a decision.

All facilitators know that warm-ups and icebreakers are useful for any workshop or group process. Problem-solving workshops are no different.

Use these problem-solving techniques to warm up a group and prepare them for the rest of the process. Activating your group by tapping into some of the top problem-solving skills can be one of the best ways to see great outcomes from your session.

  • Check-in/Check-out
  • Doodling Together
  • Show and Tell
  • Constellations
  • Draw a Tree

28. Check-in / Check-out

Solid processes are planned from beginning to end, and the best facilitators know that setting the tone and establishing a safe, open environment can be integral to a successful problem-solving process.

Check-in / Check-out is a great way to begin and/or bookend a problem-solving workshop. Checking in to a session emphasizes that everyone will be seen, heard, and expected to contribute. 

If you are running a series of meetings, setting a consistent pattern of checking in and checking out can really help your team get into a groove. We recommend this opening-closing activity for small to medium-sized groups though it can work with large groups if they’re disciplined!

Check-in / Check-out   #team   #opening   #closing   #hyperisland   #remote-friendly   Either checking-in or checking-out is a simple way for a team to open or close a process, symbolically and in a collaborative way. Checking-in/out invites each member in a group to be present, seen and heard, and to express a reflection or a feeling. Checking-in emphasizes presence, focus and group commitment; checking-out emphasizes reflection and symbolic closure.

29. Doodling Together  

Thinking creatively and not being afraid to make suggestions are important problem-solving skills for any group or team, and warming up by encouraging these behaviors is a great way to start. 

Doodling Together is one of our favorite creative ice breaker games – it’s quick, effective, and fun and can make all following problem-solving steps easier by encouraging a group to collaborate visually. By passing cards and adding additional items as they go, the workshop group gets into a groove of co-creation and idea development that is crucial to finding solutions to problems. 

Doodling Together   #collaboration   #creativity   #teamwork   #fun   #team   #visual methods   #energiser   #icebreaker   #remote-friendly   Create wild, weird and often funny postcards together & establish a group’s creative confidence.

30. Show and Tell

You might remember some version of Show and Tell from being a kid in school and it’s a great problem-solving activity to kick off a session.

Asking participants to prepare a little something before a workshop by bringing an object for show and tell can help them warm up before the session has even begun! Games that include a physical object can also help encourage early engagement before moving onto more big-picture thinking.

By asking your participants to tell stories about why they chose to bring a particular item to the group, you can help teams see things from new perspectives and see both differences and similarities in the way they approach a topic. Great groundwork for approaching a problem-solving process as a team! 

Show and Tell   #gamestorming   #action   #opening   #meeting facilitation   Show and Tell taps into the power of metaphors to reveal players’ underlying assumptions and associations around a topic The aim of the game is to get a deeper understanding of stakeholders’ perspectives on anything—a new project, an organizational restructuring, a shift in the company’s vision or team dynamic.

31. Constellations

Who doesn’t love stars? Constellations is a great warm-up activity for any workshop as it gets people up off their feet, energized, and ready to engage in new ways with established topics. It’s also great for showing existing beliefs, biases, and patterns that can come into play as part of your session.

Using warm-up games that help build trust and connection while also allowing for non-verbal responses can be great for easing people into the problem-solving process and encouraging engagement from everyone in the group. Constellations is great in large spaces that allow for movement and is definitely a practical exercise to allow the group to see patterns that are otherwise invisible. 

Constellations   #trust   #connection   #opening   #coaching   #patterns   #system   Individuals express their response to a statement or idea by standing closer or further from a central object. Used with teams to reveal system, hidden patterns, perspectives.

32. Draw a Tree

Problem-solving games that help raise group awareness through a central, unifying metaphor can be effective ways to warm-up a group in any problem-solving model.

Draw a Tree is a simple warm-up activity you can use in any group and which can provide a quick jolt of energy. Start by asking your participants to draw a tree in just 45 seconds – they can choose whether it will be abstract or realistic. 

Once the timer is up, ask the group how many people included the roots of the tree and use this as a means to discuss how we can ignore important parts of any system simply because they are not visible.

All problem-solving strategies are made more effective by thinking of problems critically and by exposing things that may not normally come to light. Warm-up games like Draw a Tree are great in that they quickly demonstrate some key problem-solving skills in an accessible and effective way.

Draw a Tree   #thiagi   #opening   #perspectives   #remote-friendly   With this game you can raise awarness about being more mindful, and aware of the environment we live in.

Each step of the problem-solving workshop benefits from an intelligent deployment of activities, games, and techniques. Bringing your session to an effective close helps ensure that solutions are followed through on and that you also celebrate what has been achieved.

Here are some problem-solving activities you can use to effectively close a workshop or meeting and ensure the great work you’ve done can continue afterward.

  • One Breath Feedback
  • Who What When Matrix
  • Response Cards

How do I conclude a problem-solving process?

All good things must come to an end. With the bulk of the work done, it can be tempting to conclude your workshop swiftly and without a moment to debrief and align. This can be problematic in that it doesn’t allow your team to fully process the results or reflect on the process.

At the end of an effective session, your team will have gone through a process that, while productive, can be exhausting. It’s important to give your group a moment to take a breath, ensure that they are clear on future actions, and provide short feedback before leaving the space. 

The primary purpose of any problem-solving method is to generate solutions and then implement them. Be sure to take the opportunity to ensure everyone is aligned and ready to effectively implement the solutions you produced in the workshop.

Remember that every process can be improved and by giving a short moment to collect feedback in the session, you can further refine your problem-solving methods and see further success in the future too.

33. One Breath Feedback

Maintaining attention and focus during the closing stages of a problem-solving workshop can be tricky and so being concise when giving feedback can be important. It’s easy to incur “death by feedback” should some team members go on for too long sharing their perspectives in a quick feedback round. 

One Breath Feedback is a great closing activity for workshops. You give everyone an opportunity to provide feedback on what they’ve done but only in the space of a single breath. This keeps feedback short and to the point and means that everyone is encouraged to provide the most important piece of feedback to them. 

One breath feedback   #closing   #feedback   #action   This is a feedback round in just one breath that excels in maintaining attention: each participants is able to speak during just one breath … for most people that’s around 20 to 25 seconds … unless of course you’ve been a deep sea diver in which case you’ll be able to do it for longer.

34. Who What When Matrix 

Matrices feature as part of many effective problem-solving strategies and with good reason. They are easily recognizable, simple to use, and generate results.

The Who What When Matrix is a great tool to use when closing your problem-solving session by attributing a who, what and when to the actions and solutions you have decided upon. The resulting matrix is a simple, easy-to-follow way of ensuring your team can move forward. 

Great solutions can’t be enacted without action and ownership. Your problem-solving process should include a stage for allocating tasks to individuals or teams and creating a realistic timeframe for those solutions to be implemented or checked out. Use this method to keep the solution implementation process clear and simple for all involved. 

Who/What/When Matrix   #gamestorming   #action   #project planning   With Who/What/When matrix, you can connect people with clear actions they have defined and have committed to.

35. Response cards

Group discussion can comprise the bulk of most problem-solving activities and by the end of the process, you might find that your team is talked out! 

Providing a means for your team to give feedback with short written notes can ensure everyone is head and can contribute without the need to stand up and talk. Depending on the needs of the group, giving an alternative can help ensure everyone can contribute to your problem-solving model in the way that makes the most sense for them.

Response Cards is a great way to close a workshop if you are looking for a gentle warm-down and want to get some swift discussion around some of the feedback that is raised. 

Response Cards   #debriefing   #closing   #structured sharing   #questions and answers   #thiagi   #action   It can be hard to involve everyone during a closing of a session. Some might stay in the background or get unheard because of louder participants. However, with the use of Response Cards, everyone will be involved in providing feedback or clarify questions at the end of a session.

Save time and effort discovering the right solutions

A structured problem solving process is a surefire way of solving tough problems, discovering creative solutions and driving organizational change. But how can you design for successful outcomes?

With SessionLab, it’s easy to design engaging workshops that deliver results. Drag, drop and reorder blocks  to build your agenda. When you make changes or update your agenda, your session  timing   adjusts automatically , saving you time on manual adjustments.

Collaborating with stakeholders or clients? Share your agenda with a single click and collaborate in real-time. No more sending documents back and forth over email.

Explore  how to use SessionLab  to design effective problem solving workshops or  watch this five minute video  to see the planner in action!

problem solving approach in community

Over to you

The problem-solving process can often be as complicated and multifaceted as the problems they are set-up to solve. With the right problem-solving techniques and a mix of creative exercises designed to guide discussion and generate purposeful ideas, we hope we’ve given you the tools to find the best solutions as simply and easily as possible.

Is there a problem-solving technique that you are missing here? Do you have a favorite activity or method you use when facilitating? Let us know in the comments below, we’d love to hear from you! 

' src=

thank you very much for these excellent techniques

' src=

Certainly wonderful article, very detailed. Shared!

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

cycle of workshop planning steps

Going from a mere idea to a workshop that delivers results for your clients can feel like a daunting task. In this piece, we will shine a light on all the work behind the scenes and help you learn how to plan a workshop from start to finish. On a good day, facilitation can feel like effortless magic, but that is mostly the result of backstage work, foresight, and a lot of careful planning. Read on to learn a step-by-step approach to breaking the process of planning a workshop into small, manageable chunks.  The flow starts with the first meeting with a client to define the purposes of a workshop.…

problem solving approach in community

How does learning work? A clever 9-year-old once told me: “I know I am learning something new when I am surprised.” The science of adult learning tells us that, in order to learn new skills (which, unsurprisingly, is harder for adults to do than kids) grown-ups need to first get into a specific headspace.  In a business, this approach is often employed in a training session where employees learn new skills or work on professional development. But how do you ensure your training is effective? In this guide, we'll explore how to create an effective training session plan and run engaging training sessions. As team leader, project manager, or consultant,…

problem solving approach in community

Effective online tools are a necessity for smooth and engaging virtual workshops and meetings. But how do you choose the right ones? Do you sometimes feel that the good old pen and paper or MS Office toolkit and email leaves you struggling to stay on top of managing and delivering your workshop? Fortunately, there are plenty of online tools to make your life easier when you need to facilitate a meeting and lead workshops. In this post, we’ll share our favorite online tools you can use to make your job as a facilitator easier. In fact, there are plenty of free online workshop tools and meeting facilitation software you can…

Design your next workshop with SessionLab

Join the 150,000 facilitators using SessionLab

Sign up for free

National Academies Press: OpenBook

Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities (2018)

Chapter: 6 community-based proactive strategies: implications for community perceptions and cooperation, 6 community-based proactive strategies: implications for community perceptions and cooperation.

Community-based proactive strategies recognize and promote the community’s active role in the crime-prevention process. They seek to define the relationship or mode of interaction between the police and the community in a way presumed to reduce crime or disorder. As we mentioned in Chapter 5 , unlike the other proactive policing approaches considered in this volume, police often employ strategies for a community-based approach with an explicit hope that they will not only reduce crime but also improve people’s assessments of police performance, increase community perceptions of police legitimacy, and enhance cooperation and community engagement to secure public order and safety ( Skogan, 2006b ). Not surprisingly, then, one might expect to see more research on how community-based strategies affect community outcomes than on how the other three proactive approaches affect community outcomes (the subject of Chapter 5 of this report). This is indeed the case, but even here the research on the community impacts of community-based interventions has concentrated heavily on two strategies: community-oriented policing and procedural justice policing, with much less attention to the community impacts of broken windows policing. Consequently, the bulk of our discussion is skewed to the first two strategies for a community-based policing approach.

While community-oriented policing and procedural justice policing are both strategies that take a community-based approach, their places in the landscape of proactive policing are distinct. The concept of what this report

calls “community-oriented policing” 1 has been central to discussions of policing for several decades, and many departments have developed various policing policies that come under the committee’s concept of a community-oriented policing strategy. Consequently, there is a large prior literature on evaluations of community-oriented policing. In contrast, the concepts informing procedural justice policing are comparatively new to the field of proactive policing, at least as policy-level interventions. The broader concept of procedural justice developed within the field of social psychology, in theory-driven studies exploring why people trust authorities, view them as legitimate and entitled to be obeyed, and consequently defer to their authority. Research has subsequently studied procedural justice and perceived legitimacy in work organizations and with court procedures. However, these concepts have only recently been directly applied to policing.

COMMUNITY-ORIENTED POLICING

As noted in Chapter 2 , community-oriented policing (also called community policing) is widely acknowledged to have many meanings, sometimes as a set of specific tactics, sometimes a set of program-level interventions, and sometimes a general philosophy of how police should relate to the community ( Cordner, 2014 ). Despite its longevity as a reform (at least three decades), as noted in Chapter 2 , there is still considerable variation in how community-oriented policing is defined. We follow Gill and colleagues (2014 , p. 405) in requiring that, to qualify in this review as community-oriented policing, an intervention must include “some type of consultation or collaboration between the police and local citizens for the purpose of defining, prioritizing, and/or solving problems.” As is the case with other proactive policing strategies, practices typical of a community-oriented strategy are often implemented in combination with practices and tactics typical of other strategies, including strategies that focus on a different policing approach. For instance, some community-oriented policing interventions include practices typical of problem-oriented policing, broken windows policing, hot spots policing, or focused deterrence. As noted many times already in this report, this hybrid character of real-world interventions makes it more difficult to draw conclusions from evaluations of these hybrid interventions regarding the impacts of community-oriented policing, as a distinctive strategy, on community outcomes.

___________________

1 The research literature has often used the term “community policing” for what we mean here by community-oriented policing. We have applied our term in reporting on the literature where the topic addressed by the author(s) seemed closer to our strategy of community-oriented policing, as presented in Chapter 2 , than to the broader concept of any community-based approach to proactive policing.

As discussed in Chapter 2 , it is well established that community-oriented policing became very popular among American police leaders in the 1990s. What is not so well acknowledged is the variable character of community-oriented policing that exists among these police agencies. For the purpose of assessing the community impact of community-oriented policing, it is a significant limitation that the research literature often lacks clear distinctions not only among the different varieties of community-oriented policing but also with respect to their scope and intensity ( Cordner, 2014 ). There currently is no metric for making comparisons across different community-oriented policing programs; therefore, it is difficult to know how appropriate it is to compare results across impact studies.

One indication of the challenges presented in summarizing the effects of community-oriented policing is to consider the difficulties in generalizing about it from the available empirical research. A useful tool in this regard is the data provided in an appendix of a systematic review of 45 studies of the impact of community-oriented policing ( Gill et al., 2014 ). This appendix provides a brief description of each of the community-oriented policing interventions described in the study reviewed. Table 6-1 shows the frequency of those that involve community engagement or collaboration. As is apparent, there are a wide variety of practices used in these interventions, ranging from foot patrols to collaboration with community groups and community newsletters. Clearly this range of practices will influence the nature and intensity of community-oriented policing’s impact on community outcomes. And these 45 studies did not attempt to determine the independent contribution of different program elements in the community-oriented policing interventions they evaluated.

Furthermore, the outcome measures employed in studies are inconsistent, making it even more difficult to draw direct comparisons ( Gill et al., 2014 , p. 422). To this point, the committee adds that these inconsistencies arise in how given measures are conceptualized, operationalized, or interpreted. An example of this is given in the classification of “legitimacy” outcome measures (measures of what this report calls “perceived legitimacy”). A single research project by Tuffin, Morris, and Poole (2006) accounted for 6 of the 10 comparisons we examined on perceived-legitimacy outcomes. The actual survey question (of residents) used for this item was, “Taking everything into account how good a job do you think the police in your local area are doing?” ( Tuffin, Morris, and Poole, 2006 , p. 51). Excellent or good responses were interpreted as showing confidence in the police. However, it is not clear why that item has more in common with other outcome indicators used by the meta-analysis to assess perceived legitimacy (e.g., “police are fair,” “trust in police,” “treating people politely”) ( Gill et al., 2014 , p. 417, Fig. 7) than it does with some of the indicators used for assessing the community outcome of “citizen satisfaction”: “good job

TABLE 6-1 Community-Focused Elements in Community-Oriented Policing Interventions

NOTE: Data from Gill et al. (2014 , App. A). The number of defined interventions per study varied from 1 to 4.

to prevent crime,” “evaluation of police,” or “quality of police service.” The last of these, “quality of police service,” is a scale comprising ratings of items that seem good candidates for perceived legitimacy, not satisfaction: police politeness, helpfulness, and perceived fairness ( Gill et al., 2014 , p. 416, Fig. 6).

Another source of variation across studies to which insufficient attention has been paid is the way in which the targeted community population is defined (Gill et al., 2006, p. 422). Most evaluations of community-oriented policing tend to aggregate “community” as a general population of residents, and this undoubtedly masks what are potentially striking differences. “Community” is most often operationalized as people who live in proximate geographic areas, typically within the boundaries of a police beat or a neighborhood. Residents of a neighborhood presumably have a stake in how their neighborhood is policed, but that stake is not necessarily uniform. The context of how people relate to police—their role—can vary profoundly. Victims and suspected offenders can be expected to hold different concerns or priorities about what they want police to do and accomplish. Those who own and work in businesses may have different priorities from those who reside near them. Those who frequent parks and recreational facilities will have a different framework for evaluating police than those who live near those facilities. And people of different ethnicity may have different histories with the police that produce different evaluation frameworks. Regardless of their role in a particular encounter with the police, people who have frequently been the object of enforcement activity possess a different set of sensitivities from others whose experiences have been as service recipients (see, for example, Brunson and Weitzer, 2007 ).

Much of the original impetus for community-oriented policing came from groups of citizens who were disgruntled because they felt abused as objects of enforcement or underserved as victims of crime ( Kelling and Moore, 1988 ), and there is currently much interest in community-oriented policing as a way to deal with both of these groups who are more likely to experience contact with the police or to desire their assistance ( President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, 2015 ; App. A of this volume). Yet the extant research on community-oriented policing typically fails to distinguish these “high-intensity” populations and thus offers little to enlighten policy and practice for the parts of society that were key to animating the movement for change.

A notable exception to the tendency to ignore high-intensity subgroups within a studied community is the evaluation of Chicago’s community policing program across three different racial groups ( Skogan, 2006b ). Comparing trends in confidence in the police 2 across Blacks, Latinos, and Whites between 1994 and 2003, the researcher noted that improvements were

2 In this study, “confidence” was measured as a composite of three scales, which were constructed from neighborhood resident surveys: perceived demeanor of officers, responsiveness to neighborhood concerns, and perceived effectiveness in controlling crime/disorder and helping victims.

observed across all measures for each racial group but added a caveat that highlights the importance of disaggregating “community” into subgroups:

In the end, however, the contrast between the general optimism of whites and the still-widespread pessimism of African Americans was almost as large in 2003 as it had been in 1994 when CAPS was still in development. Things got better between African Americans and the police, but confidence had also grown among whites, keeping the gap just as wide. “The glass was only half full” when it came to healing the breech between police and the public, for while Chicagoans were more confident in the police, they were still deeply divided by race. ( Skogan, 2006b , p. 322)

Finally, most of the studies of community-oriented policing that focus on community outcomes do relatively little to establish the strength of the causal connection between policy and practice. They tend to test the extent to which either policy or practice leads directly to each of the types of outcomes depicted in Figure 5-1 (see Chapter 5 of this report) as stages 3, 4, or 5. The correlations and/or causal links between stages 3 (community evaluations), 4 (community orientations), and 5 (community behavior) have not been a topic of systematic exploration. This presents numerous challenges for testing the validity of efforts to use community-oriented policing to promote desirable community outcomes.

We begin with these caveats in order to emphasize the difficulty in drawing conclusions regarding the effects on community outcomes of community-oriented policing. We find this surprising in some sense, given the very strong focus of community-oriented policing on changing the relationship between police and the public ( Kelling and Moore, 1988 ; National Research Council, 2004 , pp. 85–90; Skogan, 2006c ; Skolnick and Bayley, 1986 ). Despite this focus, the extant research literature makes it difficult to draw very strong conclusions about precisely those outcomes that community policing was meant to influence. The following sections outline what these studies show and what they are unable to show. 3

Community-Oriented Policing’s Impacts on Community Evaluations of the Police

Studies of the impact of community-oriented policing on community evaluations of specific aspects of police performance have focused on citizen perceptions of disorder (e.g., severity of drug problems, social disorder), citizen fear of crime, and citizen satisfaction with police performance). Gill and colleagues (2014) provided a detailed comparison of these effects

3 We rely heavily in the next sections on a recent systematic review of community-oriented policing’s impact ( Gill et al., 2014 ).

with 16 independent comparisons of perceived disorder, 18 comparisons of fear of crime, and 23 comparisons on citizen satisfaction, but fewer of these comparisons had sufficient information to calculate odds ratios (11 disorder, 10 fear, and 17 satisfaction outcomes). The meta-analysis produced only one statistically significant effect—citizen satisfaction increased—although all three outcomes showed small average effects in the expected positive direction. Satisfaction with police was characterized as a “moderate” effect (odds ratio of 1.37; Gill et al., 2014 , p. 415). This effect qualifies as “small” according to some standard rules of thumb (see, e.g., Lipsey and Wilson, 2001 ), but many communities and their leaders might consider a 37 percent improvement in the odds of citizen satisfaction to be substantial. While perhaps insufficient to change very negative evaluations to very positive ones, it could arguably yield a discernible difference in a community.

Across individual studies in all three types of community-evaluation indicators, effect sizes were in the small range. Similarly, Skogan and Hartnett (1997 , p. 210) concluded regarding Chicago’s community-policing efforts, “To be sure, the successes wrought by the program were not overly dramatic.” Returning to the full range of 17 evaluations of citizen satisfaction in the meta-analysis by Gill and colleagues (2014) , very few (just two) yielded a small effect in a negative direction (odds ratios of 0.827 and 0.479), neither statistically significant. This pattern of infrequent backfire effects was repeated with the other community outcomes assessed in the meta-analysis.

The authors concluded that there was “robust evidence that community policing increases citizen satisfaction with the police” ( Gill et al., 2014 , p. 418), and “no evidence that community policing decreases citizens’ fear of crime” (p. 419). Of course, the potential synergy between program elements is not captured by this simple analysis, so the committee also considered a comparison of programs that had all three elements of community policing present in “strong” form: organizational decentralization (beat integrity), community engagement (regular community meetings, foot/bike patrol, or positive police–citizen contact), and problem solving. Six of the 17 comparisons had all three elements but showed only a small and not statistically significant differences from those that did not. Of course, the small number of cases for comparison makes this exercise tenuous, so the available evidence provides no guidance about how best to proceed with the particular policies and practices that will promote citizen satisfaction most effectively.

Community-Oriented Policing Impacts on Orientations to the Police

The Gill and colleagues (2014) meta-analysis included 10 independent comparisons of the effect of community-oriented policing on perceived legitimacy. The most frequent measure of perceived legitimacy was confidence in the police (six comparisons). Other indicators included perceived “trust in police,” “procedural justice,” “treating people politely,” and “police fairness.” On average, the odds that people living in areas where the local police had a community-oriented policing policy viewed those police as legitimate were about 1.28 times the odds for someone living in an area where local police had no such plan. This difference was marginally statistically significant ( p = .077) ( Gill et al., 2014 , pp. 415–416).

A noteworthy feature of the sample of study comparisons in this meta-analysis is the large portion of comparisons that came from the same project. The evaluation by Tuffin, Morris, and Poole (2006) of the National Reassurance Policing Program (NRPP) in the United Kingdom accounted for 6 of the 10 comparisons. One advantage of this common origin is ease of comparability of design and measures across the six sites, which reduces the risk of variability in effects due to evaluation methodology differences in different studies. In this NRPP evaluation, there was some variability in effects across sites. Four showed stronger effect sizes (odds ratios of 1.66–3.34), and two showed much weaker changes (close to null effects). The evaluation report attributed differences in program performance to variation across sites in implementation, not to the socioeconomic characteristics of the sites ( Tuffin, Morris, and Poole, 2006 , pp. 88–90).

As with evaluations of police performance, the meta-analysis revealed only 2 of 10 studies showing a backfire effect on perceived police legitimacy. The most striking of these was a study of El Centro, California, which focused its intervention on a predominantly Mexican area of the city ( Sabath and Carter, 2000 ). 4 Although the treatment district showed statistically significant improvements in citizens’ familiarity with the police and perceptions of crime-control effectiveness, it showed no gains in trust toward the police, while the comparison district did show a statistically significant increase in trust.

4 The intervention included establishing a community center with a police substation to improve police-community relations, youth programming, permanent beat assignment of officers, and knock-and-talk visits using bilingual officers. The evaluation used a two-wave panel survey design with a matched comparison group and compared approximately 150 households in each of the treatment and comparison districts. The odds ratio calculated by the meta-analysis for the intervention’s effect was 0.440 and was statistically significant ( Gill et al., 2014 , p. 417).

Community-Oriented Policing Impacts on Cooperation and Collective Efficacy

Do citizens behave differently as a consequence of being exposed to a community-oriented policing intervention? Chapter 4 speaks to the impact of community-oriented policing on criminal and disorderly behavior. Our concern here is with two types of related behaviors: whether citizens are willing to cooperate with the police, and, as noted in Chapter 5 , what Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls (1997) termed “collective efficacy,” which refers to the degree to which people who live in communities trust their neighbors and are willing to intervene in community affairs. Both types of behavior speak to the ability of communities to enhance informal social controls either through alerting the police to community problems or working together directly to intervene in those problems.

Many expect that community-oriented policing should bring police and citizens closer together in common cause and should strengthen communication among various community groups as well as between police and the public. It should invest residents with the necessary skills, resources, and sense of empowerment to mobilize against neighborhood problems ( Renauer, 2007 ; Sargeant, Wickes, and Mazerolle, 2013 ; Slocum et al., 2010 ; Velez, 2001 ). Much of the available research on policing precursors of collective efficacy focuses on the degree of police crime-control effectiveness or perceived legitimacy (reviewed below in the section on procedural justice policing). Research seeking to test the relationships, either associational or causal, between community-oriented policing and collective efficacy is limited ( Sargeant, Wickes, and Mazerolle, 2013 ). Scott (2002) found in 77 Indianapolis neighborhoods that greater resident access to the police was associated with higher levels of social capital (not the same as collective efficacy, but sharing a concern for acting on behalf of community interests). However, other key measures of community policing failed to display a statistically significant association with social capital (e.g., frequency of police involvement in community events and activities). Renauer (2007) found evidence to support a backfire effect; increased police presence at community meetings was associated with less informal social control in 81 Portland, Oregon, neighborhoods. He speculated that low–socioeconomic status neighborhoods attracted more police attention. Sargeant, Wickes, and Mazerolle (2013) , using qualitative interviews of key informants in two Brisbane suburbs, did not find the expected association between community-oriented policing and each community’s collective efficacy. In the suburb with low collective efficacy before the intervention and a high immigrant population, police efforts to reach out to residents did not yield the expected gains because those efforts were not perceived as legitimate (i.e., were not seen as fair or effective). Nor did residents possess

the knowledge and skills needed to act effectively to mobilize organizations on their behalf. In the wealthier suburb, which had high collective efficacy prior to the intervention, the relative absence of problems disinclined police to invest much community-oriented policing effort there, nor were residents particularly desirous of such police interventions.

The strongest evaluation of community-oriented policing’s impact on collective efficacy is the assessment of the NRPP in the United Kingdom ( Tuffin, Morris, and Poole, 2006 ). This policing program had several elements: focusing policing activity on those “signal” crimes expected to have a disproportionate impact on public feelings of safety, community involvement in identifying priorities for targeting interventions and participation in the interventions, and making locally known authorities and police officers readily accessible to the community. This pre-post, matched comparison group design used a two-wave panel (1 year apart) to study program effects in one area for each of six different UK police forces. 5 The study found evidence of desired changes attributable to the NRPP for many of the outcomes measured (decreases in crime and in perceptions of antisocial behavior, increases in feelings of safety and in confidence in the police), but virtually absent was a statistically significant change relative to comparison sites in measures of social cohesion, feeling trust in other members of the community, collective efficacy, or involvement in voluntary/community activity. Of the five outcome indicators used, only one (trust in the community) had a statistically significant (but modest) positive increase when pooled across all sites, 6 but there were no statistically significant changes in measures of willingness of neighbors to intervene or of voluntary activity. At the individual site level, the difference in perceived legitimacy across treated and untreated groups was statistically significant in only 3 of the 30 tests. The evaluators speculated that the development of social capacity may take longer than changing community perceptions of conditions in their neighborhood and feelings about the police.

To summarize, most of this small number of studies on community-oriented policing’s record in promoting collective efficacy are cross sectional in nature. Given their designs, these studies can only establish whether there is the expected statistical relationship; they cannot distinguish how much of any association found is due to the effects of community policing on collective efficacy and how much is due to the effects of collective efficacy on community policing (the issue of potential reverse causality). Nor can they rule out the possibility of third common causes (confounders). On the

5 The number of respondents available from both waves varied between 170 and 205 for each community outcome assessed.

6 There was a 5 percentage point difference between treatment and control sites ( Tuffin, Morris, and Poole, 2006 , p. 57).

other hand, these studies can provide credible information about people’s feelings about their experiences, as well as suggestions about how those feelings are associated with their views about the police. The exception to this limitation is the evaluation of the NRPP, but that study found only small differences that were not statistically significant, using conventional measures of confidence.

There is a significant body of research on the correlates and predictors of citizens’ crime reporting behavior, but very little empirical research that explicitly examines the causal linkage between community-oriented policing and crime reporting ( Schnebly, 2008 ). 7 One study examined the effects of police department resource commitment to community-oriented policing on the willingness of victims and third parties to report victimizations to the police or other nonpolice third parties (apartment manager, school administrator) for 2,379 assault and robbery incidents recorded by the National Crime Victimization Survey from 1997 through 1999 ( Schnebly, 2008 ).

Controlling for other factors known to influence reporting behavior (victim and city characteristics), Schnebly found that in cities with a larger percentage of the force working in full-time community-oriented-policing assignments, third parties were more likely to report victimizations to a police official. Further, victims in cities served by police agencies with higher portions of the force working as community-oriented policing officers were more inclined to notify nonpolice third parties than to make a report to the police. Additional analyses showed that the amount of training of police recruits and of residents in community-oriented policing showed no statistically significant relationship to victimization reporting behaviors. However, the proportion of current officers who had received community-oriented policing training showed a statistically significant positive relationship to the likelihood of residents reporting their victimization. The study also examined whether community-oriented policing’s relationships with the community were conditioned by either victim or event-related characteristics and found some associations of this sort. For instance, residential instability reduced the strength of the negative relationship of full-time community-oriented policing staffing to the likelihood of police notification. The study speculated about the apparent contradictions and complexities of the findings. However, it is difficult to draw conclusions from a single study, particularly one with a number of self-acknowledged limitations. The measures of community-oriented policing staffing did not distinguish between different approaches to community-oriented policing, nor did they consider the degree to which officers who were not community-oriented-

7 We exclude from consideration here the research that examines the effects of procedural justice policing and perceived legitimacy on crime-reporting behavior, which we cover in the section below on procedural justice policing.

policing specialists engaged in community-oriented policing activities. Further, variation in the degree of community-oriented policing effort within a given city may vary tremendously from neighborhood to neighborhood, but only city-level measurement was possible. And as is true with the literature on community-oriented policing and collective efficacy, this study was cross sectional, measuring all variables during the same time period.

In summary, the available literature on the relationship between community-oriented policing and community behavior consists predominantly of studies of collective efficacy and crime reporting. Three aspects of this literature are important: the number of studies is small, the findings across them are mixed, and there are many methodological limitations, particularly with interpreting study results as evidence for causal connections. These aspects make it inappropriate to draw conclusions about the effects of community-oriented policing on citizen cooperative behavior.

Long-Term Effects of Community-Oriented Policing

In addition to enhancing perceived police legitimacy, an important goal of community-oriented policing is to build, improve, or sustain communities. Such transformations rarely take place in the span of months or even a few years. Yet most studies of community-oriented policing’s effects (and associations with outcomes) use a time frame that is short term, generally a year or less. The sources of such temporal bias are many, but three are particularly powerful: (1) Research funding cycles tend to support short-term projects. (2) American police organizations experience a high rate of turnover at the top, which makes for greater program instability as new chiefs tend to be “new brooms,” sweeping out their predecessors’ innovations to make room for their own ( Mastrofski, 2015 ). (3) It is difficult to sustain experimental and even quasi-experimental research protocols for extended time periods.

How long does it take for a policing innovation to register an effect and sustain it? One might expect that the longer an intervention has been operating, the greater its prospects for showing an effect. For example, it has been suggested that the changes to organizational structure that are part of community-oriented policing (e.g., decentralization and reduced hierarchy and specialization) may simply take many years to accomplish and to yield organizational transformation ( Mastrofski and Willis, 2010 , p. 71). Alternatively, some interventions may realize their successes early, and others may even decline over the long run because they are insufficiently flexible to respond to changing conditions.

One of the few exceptions to the bias toward short-term research is the decade-long evaluation of community-oriented policing in Chicago ( Skogan,

2006b , Chapter 10). 8 Between 1994 and 2003, fear of crime declined under this community-oriented policing intervention (at the greatest rate for Blacks and at the lowest rate for Latinos). During that same period, perceptions of disorder declined significantly for Blacks while increasing significantly for Latinos. And trends in evaluations of police “confidence” (demeanor, responsiveness, and performance) increased for all three racial groups. Interestingly, the generally increasing year-to-year level of these indicators (combined into a single quality-of-service index) plateaued for all ethnic groups after about 6 years, with the group scoring the lowest percentage of positive responses (Blacks) at 40 percent and the highest group (Whites) scoring more than 60 percent, with Latinos in the middle at nearly 50 percent ( Skogan, 2006b , p. 280). Unfortunately, because community-oriented policing was implemented citywide for most of that time period, there were no comparison groups to help rule out the effects of other influences. 9

Finally, it is worth noting that the study of long-term community effects calls for a consideration of the long-term history of police “treatments.” Neighborhoods with a long history of receiving one or more elements of community-oriented policing may respond differently from those with little or no such experience, and the response over time may vary with the duration of the treatment. Whether neighborhoods that have experienced several years of positive police outreach are more responsive to a new community-oriented policing program than those for whom there is no history of such outreach is an open question. Neighborhoods with a history of fraught relations with the police may take longer to respond positively than neighborhoods with a more positive history.

Environmental Conditions

Because community-oriented policing requires interaction between the police and the community for it to achieve effective outcomes, the environment in which a community-oriented policing intervention is delivered is particularly important for its success. This means that one should approach generalizing about the effects of community-oriented policing with a healthy respect for the possibility that it will depend upon the character of the community where it is employed ( Reiss, 1992 ; Klinger, 2004 ). At what sorts of

8 Another study that offered a slightly longer-term evaluation of a community-oriented policing program was a follow-up to the UK’s NRPP, which added a 2nd-year evaluation to the original 1-year study ( Quinton and Morris, 2008 ). The follow-up found a continuation in the second year of the desirable impacts observed in the original evaluation by Tuffin, Morris, and Poole (2006) .

9 It is difficult to determine whether the plateauing pattern was due to program features or how they were implemented, other features of the organization (e.g., the growth in Compstat’s potentially antagonistic influence), or a variety of external factors.

jurisdictions have community-oriented policing studies been conducted? It is instructive to consider the sample produced by the systematic review by Gill and colleagues (2014) , the review used above for its outcome showing that the strongest outcome association with community-oriented policing interventions was citizen satisfaction. Of the 17 comparisons, 6 were made in UK areas of large size or served by large police departments, at least by American standards (e.g., Leicester, Surrey, Bexley, Thames Valley); 5 were conducted in Chicago, 2 in Australia, 1 in Newark, 1 in Houston, 1 in Madison, and 1 in a small California city. While in some respects this represents a diverse sample, it clearly ignores or grossly underrepresents rural, small town, and suburban agencies in the United States. The strong representation of the United Kingdom and Chicago in particular make it hazardous to formulate a basis for generalizing results broadly.

It is also appropriate to reiterate the point that studies of community-oriented policing mostly focus on effects at a level below the jurisdiction (police beat, neighborhood, or district/borough). The prospects of jurisdictionwide effects remain virtually unexamined.

Summary . The available empirical research on community-oriented policing’s community effects focuses on citizen perceptions of police performance (in terms of what they do and the consequences for community disorder), satisfaction with police, and perceptions of police legitimacy. There is considerable variability of findings within and between types of community outcome measures. Overall, community-oriented policing programs show a tendency to increase citizen satisfaction and have positive but weaker effects on perceptions of police legitimacy. Nonetheless, there are a number of limitations in the extant research that limit the committee’s capacity to draw firm conclusions about what this means.

BROKEN WINDOWS POLICING

As we noted in Chapter 2 , the committee considers broken windows policing to be a strategy for a community-based approach. Our reasoning is that the mechanism that underlies the original formulation of the community-based approach is rooted in making changes in the community. Such changes are driven in part by changes in policing, but it remains the case that the long-term goal of broken windows policing is to enhance the ability of the community to exercise informal social controls presumed to play a central role in the nature and extent of community order and safety ( Weisburd et al., 2015 ; Wilson and Kelling, 1982 ).

There are two specific outcomes relevant to our discussion that are predicted by the broken windows logic model. The first is that fear of crime is a key causal factor in increasing crime rates. A key purpose of broken

windows policing is to reduce fear of crime, which should lead in the long run to stronger informal social controls in urban communities. Wilson and Kelling (1982 , p. 31) noted in discussing the Newark Fear of Crime Experiment:

First, outside observers should not assume that they know how much of the anxiety now endemic in many big-city neighborhoods stems from a fear of ‘‘real’’ crime and how much from a sense that the street is disorderly, a source of distasteful, worrisome encounters. The people of Newark, to judge from their behavior and their remarks to interviewers, apparently assign a high value to public order, and feel relieved and reassured when the police help them maintain that order.

The second outcome is similar to that which was discussed above in regard to community-oriented policing. Broken windows policing would be expected to increase the degree to which citizens are willing to intervene in doing something about community problems. For Wilson and Kelling (1982) , social and physical disorder are key factors in the decline of communities. As discussed in Chapter 2 , broken windows policing, with its focus on reducing disorder, is expected to reverse the decline of collective efficacy in communities, thereby preventing a breakdown in community social controls.

The Impact of Broken Windows Policing on Fear of Crime and Collective Efficacy

In assessing the impacts of broken windows policing, the committee drew heavily from a recent systematic review conducted by Weisburd and colleagues (2015) . They examined studies that used either a control/comparison group design (experimental or quasi-experimental) or a before-after assessment of outcomes, and each study had to report impacts on fear of crime and/or informal social control. Overall, they identified just six studies that examined the impact of disorder policing on fear or collective efficacy/ informal social control. One of the studies was a randomized experiment. Four studies used quasi-experimental designs with comparison groups, and one study used a before-after design. All six examined impacts on fear, while only one examined impacts on informal social control (defined as collective efficacy). The committee’s review did not identify any additional studies.

The earliest studies that examined the impact of disorder policing on fear were a pair of Police Foundation studies by Pate and colleagues (1985b , 1985c ). The first examined a police program in Newark, New Jersey, that aimed to reduce fear of crime by reducing the signs of crime ( Pate et al., 1985a ). Findings were mixed across different measures, but as a whole, the

authors concluded that the program was ineffective in reducing fear in the targeted area relative to the comparison area. The second Newark study involved an order-maintenance program as part of the police intervention, and it found that fear of property crime was significantly reduced, relative to the comparison area ( Pate et al., 1985b ).

Research by McGarrell, Giacomazzi, and Thurman (1999) examined the impact of a community policing program that involved elements of broken windows policing (improving physical conditions, targeting drug and social disorder problems) in the area surrounding a public housing facility. Fear of crime was significantly reduced relative to the comparison area, even though there were no statistically significant reductions in crime. On the other hand, a pre-post case study of a partnership policing program in two villages in Wales found no statistically significant impacts on fear ( Rogers, 2002 ).

Finally, two more recent and related studies also produced mixed findings. (These findings are also reviewed in Chapter 5 , as they both are also hot spots policing initiatives.) Using data from the Police Foundation Displacement and Diffusion study conducted in Jersey City, New Jersey, Weisburd and colleagues (2006b) and Hinkle and Weisburd (2008) found that aggressive police crackdowns on social and physical disorder appeared to increase fear of crime in the target areas relative to the surrounding catchment areas that did not receive any extra police attention. However, a randomized experimental evaluation of the impacts of broken windows policing in three cities in California, designed in part as a follow-up to the Police Foundation study, found that a 6-month police intervention that focused on reducing social and physical disorder but encouraged police use of discretion (see Kelling, 1999 ) had no impact on fear of crime or collective efficacy ( Weisburd et al., 2011 ). An important point is that this study is the only one identified by the committee that evaluated the impact of broken windows policing on any measure of informal social control. The authors suggested that the differing findings across these two studies were due to the differing nature of the interventions. While both police programs were consistent with the broken windows strategy of targeting disorder, the Jersey City intervention involved a very aggressive crackdown on disorder that included sweeps, a violent offender removal program, and intensive enforcement aimed at street-level drug sales and use and at prostitution. The intervention in California used a less heavy-handed approach to broken windows policing. It emphasized rapid repair of physical disorder and a discretionary approach to handling social disorder through mediation and warnings.

In this regard, recall also the differing findings in the two studies by Pate and colleagues (1985b , 1985c ) discussed above. The intervention that attempted to reduce fear by cleaning up disorder (reducing the signs of

crime) showed no impact on fear, while the policing program that had a disorder abatement component was found to reduce fear by a statistically significant amount. Thus, it may be that how the police design and deliver a disorder-focused program may affect the extent to which the mechanisms of broken windows policing are confirmed.

Weisburd and colleagues (2015) provided in their meta-analysis a quantitative summary of the evidence of these disorder policing programs on fear of crime. (They did not provide a quantitative summary regarding collective efficacy because only one study reported on these outcomes.) Using a random effects model because of the variability of treatments and outcomes, they found a slightly negative, albeit statistically not significant, impact. This suggests, if anything, a very slight backfire effect in the samples examined, but the authors concluded that the data do not, in general, support or refute any clear impact. We think their conclusion is reasonable, given the small number of studies available.

All in all, the committee simply does not have enough evidence to draw a solid conclusion regarding the impacts of broken windows policing.

Summary . The committee is not able to draw a conclusion regarding the impacts of broken windows policing on fear of crime or on collective efficacy. This is due in part to the surprisingly small number of studies that examine the community outcomes of broken windows policing and in part to the mixed effects observed. The committee notes how little attention has been paid to community processes in this area, given the emphasis on enhancing community social controls in the original logic model for this strategy as proposed by Wilson and Kelling (1982) . The importance of informal social controls in their logic model would imply that collecting data on collective efficacy is critical. But we found only one study that attempted to assess collective efficacy. With regard to fear of crime as an outcome of interest to the model, there are more studies, but they differ considerably in the observed change in fear of crime, based on the policing tactics carried out in the intervention under study. Overall, it appears that softer approaches that focus on community engagement and utilization of police discretion are more effective in reducing fear. Such approaches are also more consistent with Kelling’s suggestions for how police should address disorder ( Kelling, 1999 ; Kelling and Coles, 1996 ).

PROCEDURAL JUSTICE

For a variety of reasons the question of perceived legitimacy has become more central to proactive policing in the United States over the past several years. Perceived legitimacy may be defined as the belief that the police are entitled to exercise authority within the community and that

as a consequence their directives ought to be accepted and receive deference. Recent events involving police shootings in different U.S. communities and subsequent public protests have led national police leaders to be concerned about the issue of public trust and to seek information about how to increase trust. An example of that effort is the recent report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing (2015) , which made perceived legitimacy a core theme in its discussion of policing. Because of this concern about their legitimacy, police departments have increasingly developed proactive efforts to engage in policies and practices that promote and sustain their perceived legitimacy among the people in the communities they police. As we detail below, these efforts have typically focused on enhancing procedural justice in police-citizen encounters. Our main question is whether proactive policing programs based on a procedural justice model improve attitudes toward the police and cooperation with the police.

Perceptions of police legitimacy are subjective and must be studied by interviewing people and discerning their orientations toward the police. Hence, by definition, efforts to understand perceived legitimacy need to focus on people’s perceptions about the police and their subjective reactions to police actions. The model outlined in Figure 5-1 in Chapter 5 of this report presents a logic flow that incorporates these subjective responses to policing. It moves from police policies and practices to what is actually going on in the community (police behavior) to the subjective evaluations and orientations of the people within that community (police legality/perceived fairness; popular legitimacy). To the degree that this logic model is accepted as a causal model, it suggests that those perceptions, in turn, feed into law-related behaviors in the community (cooperation, engagement).

One key question is whether changes in police behavior do in fact change the law-related behavior of people in the community. A second question is why that change occurs, which is an issue of mediating mechanisms. The presumed mechanism in procedural justice models is that outlined in Figure 5-1 (perceived procedural justice shapes perceptions of police legitimacy). While some of the connections outlined in that model have been tested in prior studies that have been based upon the assumption that the logic model presented is a causal model, there has been no single study that tests this entire model. Nor have there been efforts to explore issues of bi-causality. In a similar case, Chapter 4 of this report outlines research that associates hot spots policing with crime rate changes. The presumed mediating (causal) mechanism in that case is deterrence. However, as is the case here, there are no studies that directly test whether hot spots policing changes the crime rate because it changes people’s perceptions about the risk of being caught. It could be the case that hot spots policing changes the popular legitimacy of the police. In other words, in both cases there is indirect evidence to support the presumed causal connection in the underly-

ing logic model, but in neither case has there been a direct test of that causal mechanism in a proactive policing intervention. In part, this lacuna reflects the inherent difficulties of testing mediating mechanisms.

One important aspect of this overall logic model is the linkage between evaluations, orientations, and behaviors—that is, the aspect of the model that begins with people’s subjective evaluations of the police and flows to their behaviors. This element in the logic model reflects the fact that perceived legitimacy of policing represents people’s evaluations and orientations, rather than objective realities. Therefore, it must be studied through interviews with members of the community.

Antecedents of Perceived Legitimacy

Within the psychological literature on the antecedents of perceived legitimacy, a number of studies suggest that perceptions of the procedural justice of police actions are strongly related to perceived legitimacy. 10 Procedural justice in policing refers to an interrelated cluster of evaluations of different aspects of the way police officers behave when dealing with the public. These non-experimental studies support a logic model that says that when people deal with authorities, their evaluations of the perceived fairness of the procedures through which authority is exercised influence their perceptions of police legitimacy more strongly than does the perceived outcome of the encounter ( Tyler, 2006 ; Tyler, Fagan, and Geller, 2014 ; Tyler and Jackson, 2014 ). Similarly, when people are making overall assessments of the legitimacy of a criminal justice institution in their community, they appear to focus on how members of that institution generally deal with the public ( Sunshine and Tyler, 2003 ; Tyler, 2006 ; Tyler, Fagan, and Geller, 2014 ; Tyler and Jackson, 2014 ).

The psychological literature on perceived procedural justice has identified four elements of experience that are linked to whether people evaluate institutions as being procedurally just. Those dimensions are not derived from prescriptive norms identified and defended by legal scholars and political philosophers. Rather, they have been drawn from research on the criteria that community members themselves use to rate their experiences ( Tyler, 1988 ). Studies suggest that there is substantial agreement across race, gender, and income levels in the criteria that define a fair procedure

10 Abuwala and Farole (2008) ; Bradford (2011) ; Elliott, Thomas, and Ogloff (2011) ; Farole (2007) ; Hasisi and Weisburd (2011) ; Hinds (2007) ; Hinds and Murphy (2007) ; Jonathan-Zamir and Weisburd (2013) ; Kitzmann and Emery (1993) ; Mazerolle et al. (2013b) ; Myhill and Bradford (2012) ; Tor, Gazal-Ayal, and Garcia (2010) ; Tyler (2006) ; Tyler, Casper, and Fisher (1989) ; Tyler and Fagan (2008) ; Wemmers (1996) .

( Tyler and Huo, 2002 ). Those criteria, noted in Chapter 2 of this report, are listed in Box 6-1 .

Two of the criteria shown in Box 6-1 are linked to how police officers are perceived to make decisions: (1) whether they provide opportunities for voice, allowing members of the public to state their perspective or tell their side of the story before decisions are made and (2) whether they make decisions in ways that people regard as neutral, rule-based, consistent, and

without bias. Two other criteria are linked to how the police are viewed as treating people: (1) whether they treat people with the dignity, courtesy, and respect that they deserve as human beings and as members of the community and (2) whether people believe that their motives are trustworthy and benevolent: that is, that the police are sincerely trying to do what is good for the people in the community. The model suggests that perceived trustworthiness is the key to community acceptance of discretionary decisions.

The key to understanding this model is that the criteria focus on how people experience policing, that is, whether they feel they have voice, whether they think the procedures are neutral, whether they feel respected, and whether they infer that the police are trustworthy. The underlying argument of procedural justice is that the way people perceive these features of police action shapes whether people do or do not judge the police to be legitimate.

Procedural justice as defined by these four criteria has been typically assessed in one or both of two ways. The first is to ask people how fairly “decisions were made” or how “they were treated.” The second is to ask about the four aspects of procedural justice that emerge from studies of the meaning of procedural justice ( Tyler, 1988 ). When studies assess subjective voice, neutrality, respect, and trust, they typically find that these dimensions are highly correlated and that all four dimensions correlate strongly with evaluations of overall justice in decision making and treatment ( Tyler, 1988 ; Tyler and Fagan, 2008 ; Worden and McLean, 2014 ).

These findings suggest that it is possible to view perceived procedural justice as an overall concept by asking people questions such as “were decisions made fairly” and/or “were you treated fairly”? It is equally possible to distinguish four component dimensions contributing to it. Empirical studies indicate that people distinguish more strongly among these four dimensions when they are evaluating their personal experiences than when they are making ratings of general police behavior in their community ( Tyler, 2006 ).

In addition to perceptions of police treatment along the four dimensions that contribute to perceived legitimacy, researchers have also observed and coded officer conduct to determine how officer actions relate to those perceptions. That is, rather than relying upon a research participant’s personal perceptions and judgments about how the police treated her, researchers can construct a protocol for observing and classifying officer behavior that conforms to the definition of procedural justice, such as behavior showing those features listed in Box 6-1 . Such a protocol requires sufficiently clear and detailed instructions to create reliable measures of officer conduct that trained third-party observers can replicate reliably (and in that sense, objectively) from situation to situation and across observers. Using this approach Worden and McLean (2014) coded officer conduct in the areas predicted to influence perceived procedural justice that fall into the category of “police practices” in the logic model portrayed in Figure 5-1 .

Some type of coding of officer behaviors that are distinct from the subjective evaluations of either the people involved or the officers involved is essential for translating the concept of perceived procedural justice into terms that police officers can use to conform their behavior to the requirements of that concept. Interestingly, the relatively few studies that have explored objective measures of the components of perceived procedural justice have found that, unlike subjective measures (community members’ perceptions), the four elements portrayed in Box 6-1 are only modestly related, suggesting that they are best conceived as a formative index ( Jonathan-Zamir, Mastrofski, and Moyal, 2015 ; Worden and McLean, 2014 ). Further, the only study ( Worden and McLean, 2014 ) to have compared objective and subjective measures of officer conduct along these dimensions found that the two measures are themselves related but the magnitude of that connection varies across dimensions (see discussion below). An important emerging area of research uses the coding of police videos to establish the objective features of police behavior under different circumstances and the connection of that behavior to people’s experiences with the police ( Voigt et al., 2017 ).

Given the relatively recent interest in the procedural justice model of proactive policing, there is, as we note below, a limited literature that examines whether perceived procedural justice is a key factor in explaining perceptions of legitimacy. At the same time, there is a large research literature that has been developing over the past century in social psychology, and more recently, in criminal justice outside policing. The committee thought it important to summarize this literature in drawing conclusions more generally about the relevance of the procedural justice model for policing.

General Evidence on the Procedural Justice Logic Model Outside of Policing

What empirical evidence supports the procedural justice model? The theoretical underpinnings of perceived procedural justice are from social psychology ( Leventhal, 1980 ; Thibaut and Walker, 1975 ), so initial evidence in this area comes from research in that field. The first research program in this area was that of John Thibaut and Laurens Walker (1975) and is summarized in their book Procedural Justice . Their research is reviewed in The Social Psychology of Procedural Justice ( Lind and Tyler, 1988 ). The hallmark of these studies is that they are well-designed randomized controlled trials. Their context is variations in courtroom procedures, and they demonstrated that different procedures are rated differently in terms of perceived procedural justice. Procedural variations also shape a variety of types of evaluations of judicial procedures and/or authorities.

These procedural justice findings were replicated in a series of studies conducted within the Thibaut-Walker research group ( Houlden et al., 1978 ; LaTour, 1978 ; Lind, Thibaut, and Walker, 1973 ; Lind et al., 1978 ; Thibaut, Walker, and Lind, 1972 ; Thibaut, Friedland, and Walker, 1974 ; Thibaut and Walker, 1975 ; Walker et al., 1974 ). The strength of these studies is their high internal validity, while their weaknesses include their laboratory context ( Damaska, 1975 ; Hayden and Anderson, 1979 ), their lack of measurement of perceived legitimacy as an outcome of personal experiences, and—in the context of this report—their lack of focus on the police.

The theoretical elements in the psychological literature on procedural justice have been reviewed by Miller (2001) and MacCoun (2005) . Miller identified two behavioral consequences of procedural injustice . The first is a marked disinclination to comply with authorities. The second is a diminished willingness to pursue group goals and concerns. He also noted the absence of any negative consequences of fair procedures and that a focus on using procedures for exercising police authority that are experienced by the public as fair valuably expands the universe of goals beyond compliance to include enhancing the viability of organizations.

When MacCoun (2005) conducted his review, the social psychology literature had more than 700 articles on the topic of procedural justice. MacCoun’s review suggests that, across the wide range of types of authority considered in this literature, experimental variations in actual procedural justice and differences in perceived procedural justice in different settings are both consistently found to shape compliance and cooperation with authorities. In particular, these effects were found with both experimental and correlational research designs. MacCoun (2005 , p. 173) noted that “the sheer heterogeneity of tasks, domains, populations, designs, and analytic methods provides remarkable convergence and triangulation” in support of the core propositions of the procedural justice model.

The central arguments of procedural justice models have subsequently been tested in management settings, and a distinct literature on procedural justice has developed within the sub-disciplines of organizational psychology/organizational behavior. An early example is from Earley and Lind (1987) , who reported on a study in which workers were randomly assigned to work under different procedures. These differences were found to influence the workers’ perceptions of fairness and performance on the job. The subsequent literature on procedural justice in work settings has expanded broadly to include variations in many aspects of work organizations and their association with a number of dependent variables, including but not limited to adherence to rules and work requirements. Some studies are conducted in ways that provide support for a causal connection between these variables, while others more appropriately support the demonstration of an association.

Cohen-Charash and Spector (2001) reviewed 190 studies (148 field studies and 42 laboratory studies) and found that variations in workplace characteristics reliably shaped perceived fairness. Procedural justice was reliably related to a number of workers’ evaluations, including satisfaction with one’s job, pay, supervisor, management, and performance appraisal procedures ( Cohen-Charash and Spector, 2001 , Table 7, p. 299). It was further associated with commitment to the job, normative commitment, trust in the organization, trust in one’s supervisor, and the employee’s intention to remain at or leave their job (Table 7, p. 300). Variations in the workplace characteristics associated with differences in perceived fairness were found to have an uneven relationship with required workplace behaviors. Studies found an association with workplace performance for field studies but not for lab studies. The studies consistently found an association with voluntary cooperation (organization citizenship behavior) and counterproductive work behavior (more perceived fairness leads to less shirking, sabotage, etc.). Many of these studies are experiments, and their results support the argument that these connections are not only associations but also reflect causal connections.

Colquitt and colleagues (2001) reviewed the organizational justice 11 literature, and Colquitt and colleagues (2013) re-reviewed the original set of studies, as well as the subsequent literature. In the 2013 re-review, in which the authors identified 493 distinct studies, they found statistically significant overall influences of procedural justice on trust, organizational citizenship behavior, task performance, and (negatively) on counterproductive work behavior. The review found equally strong relationships for studies that focus upon particular events and those that make overall workplace evaluations. Perhaps most significantly, in terms of the model outlined, Colquitt and colleagues (2013) conducted a mediational analysis and found that the relationship between the organizational justice of the organization and relevant employee behaviors is partially mediated by “social exchange quality” (see Colquitt et al., 2013 , Fig. 1, p. 217). 12 Social exchange quality is quantified as an index that combines measures of trust, mutual respect, perceived management support, and commitment. In many respects, it is similar to the concept of perceived legitimacy in a management context. This type of mediating role has also been identified in more recent studies

11 Studies of procedural justice in organizational settings often use the term “organizational justice” to consider three interrelated aspects of what is here being called “procedural justice”: organizational justice, interactional justice, and informational justice.

12 The term partial mediation refers to a situation in which the direct relationship between two variables is significantly reduced when a mediator is introduced, but there is still a significant direct relationship.

of management settings ( Ma, Liu, and Liu, 2014 ). 13 Many of the studies reviewed are laboratory or field experiments that provide evidence not merely of statistically significant association but also of causal connection.

In the case of compliance, several studies illustrate the influence of the procedural justice of the climate of an organization as evaluated by employees and their compliance with rules and rulings, which is treated in this literature as an aspect of task performance. Greenberg (1994) manipulated the objective fairness of the enactment of smoking bans in a work setting and found compliance variations. Greenberg (1990) varied the objective fairness of pay changes and found an impact on employee theft. Lind and colleagues (1993) conducted a field study involving interviews with disputants and found that perceived fairness shaped the acceptance of arbitration awards. Dunford and Devine (1998) and Lind and colleagues (2000) interviewed employees and found that variations in the perceived fairness of termination procedures predicted whether terminated workers filed lawsuits. In a multinational setting, Kim and Mauborgne (1993) conducted a non-experimental survey-based study and found that rule following was linked to perceived management fairness.

In recent years there has been a series of studies of the association of procedural justice with the perceived legitimacy of the court system. Several studies deal with the courts. They find a significant association between trust and confidence in courts and their perceived procedural justice ( Abuwala and Farole, 2008 ; Baker, 2016 ; Dillon and Emery, 1996 ; Farole, 2007 ; Kitzmann and Emery, 1994 ; Shute, Hood, and Seemungal, 2005 ; Tyler, 2001 ; Wemmers, Van der Leeden, and Steensma, 1995 ; Wemmers, 2013 ). A significant association was also found between perceived procedural justice and the willingness to accept court decisions ( Baker, 2016 ; MacCoun et al., 1988 ; Tyler and Huo, 2002 ). Some of these studies are experiments, and their findings support an argument for the causal influence of procedural justice on these elements of perceived legitimacy in legal proceedings.

In summary, the logic model underlying the procedural justice policing strategy has been widely supported in studies varying in their focus and methodology. What is particularly striking is the convergence of these findings. Many studies, including those with experimental variations in pro-

13 This literature was also reviewed by Chang (2015) , who concluded that there are statistically significant associations between organizational justice and task performance ( Chang, 2015 , Table 2) and between ratings of organizational justice and organizational citizenship behavior (Table 3). He suggested that both procedural justice (fair decision making) and interactional justice (fair interpersonal treatment of employees) are significantly associated with task performance and cooperative workplace behaviors ( Chang, 2015 , p. 34). Interestingly, this review found equally strong relationships irrespective of whether employee behavior was self-rated or assessed by independent third parties. Again, many of these studies are experiments.

cedures, suggest that it is possible to reliably create policies and practices that influence perceived procedural justice. Studies also suggest that such variations shape not only perceived procedural justice but also compliance, cooperation, and a variety of other types of organizationally relevant behaviors.

The Specific Features of Procedural Justice That Shape Perceived Legitimacy

The large literature in social psychology establishes that it is possible to create settings that reliably influence perceived procedural justice ( Lind and Tyler, 1988 ). The most replicable manipulations of procedural justice have involved variations in two procedural elements: voice (of those being acted upon) and neutrality (of those conducting the procedure). Voice manipulations typically vary whether or not people have input into legal decisions, while neutrality is manipulated through variations in whether or not the decision maker explains what facts or rules were used in making the decision.

The original Thibaut and Walker (1975) research varied court procedures between adversarial and inquisitorial, a variation which shapes whether people do or do not have (indirect) voice. Other studies varied whether or not the procedure produces decisions that are explained to participants. One element of procedural justice is whether or not authorities explain the basis for their decisions. In work-related studies conducted in experimental settings, there are often experimental variations introduced in terms of whether the supervisor does or does not explain how compensation was determined. Subsequent studies in this organizational justice literature have varied several aspects of work conditions in work organizations and then tested for any impact upon perceived justice. For example, variations of work conditions would include whether people are allowed to participate in a performance appraisal session at which their pay is determined or whether the reasons for job layoffs are explained to them. The study participants might participate in a performance task and receive or do not receive an explanation for the way their performance was rated when compensation was determined. The experimental variation might involve differences in how the basis for compensation was explained (or if it was explained at all) or, where appropriate, whether or not the participants had voice and could advocate for the quality of their work. These studies have found that a variety of types of human resource practice variations have a systematic impact (either positive or negative) with perceptions of procedural justice ( Tremblay et al., 2010 ). Because these studies are experiments, they suggest evidence that variations in objective work conditions influence

perceptions of procedural justice. Similarly, elements of leader behavior are associated with procedural justice ( Koivisto and Lipponen, 2015 ).

The court system is one type of organization in which organizational justice has been studied. An empirical literature evaluating the structure of the courts provides guidance concerning the features of courts that shape the nature of the interactions people have with authorities in courts. As an example, a substantial body of studies of restorative justice conferences have found that such conferences have a statistically significant association with later levels of recidivism, and are also experienced by participants as having more features of positive procedural justice than do the features of traditional case disposition ( Hipple, Gruenewald, and McGarrell, 2014 ). Studies also have considered what happens in a courtroom. Greene and colleagues (2010) coded objective features of courtroom atmosphere and found that they were systematically related to litigants’ perceptions of justice.

The role of arbitrators is similar to the role of police officers in that they do not seek voluntary consent. However, both arbitrators and mediators (who do need the consent of the parties they deal with) want to craft solutions that will not be resisted and undermined by the two opposing parties, so they benefit from following the principles of procedural justice. There have been studies of the features of mediation and other alternative dispute resolution procedures that lead to their perceived fairness in the eyes of all of the parties in an interaction ( Tyler, 1989 ). As with restorative justice conferences, those features can serve as the basis for procedural designs. Core features include giving both parties the ability to present their side of the story, having a neutral decision maker (the third party), believing that the third-party decision maker is listening to and considering each party’s arguments, and feeling that the third party is sincerely trying to reach a solution that is responsive to both opposing parties’ concerns.

Effective third parties in these informal proceedings know to treat the opposing parties with courtesy, to listen to and acknowledge their issues, and to account for those concerns when presenting proposed solutions ( Tyler, 1987 , 1988 , 1989 ). They are aware that evidence of favoritism or bias undermines their authority. Because mediation focuses upon gaining voluntary acceptance, mediators involved in dispute resolutions learn from their experience to follow the principles of procedural justice.

Utility of employee training is another area in which the management literature helps in identifying impacts of procedural justice. To test the impact of training union officers in procedural justice, Skarlicki and Latham (1996) used a quasi-experimental design comparing union leaders who received procedural justice training with leaders who did not receive training. After 3 months of training, workers who were working under trained leaders reported greater procedural justice in their workplace and engaged

in more peer-assessed union citizenship behavior. These behavioral changes were found to be mediated by employee evaluations of procedural justice. Skarlicki and Latham (1997) replicated their first study and found similar outcomes, but they were only partially mediated by procedural justice. Cole and Latham (1997) replicated this training program and found that trained supervisors were rated by outside experts as solving problems more fairly. Another study conducted by Nakamura and colleagues (2016) randomly assigned managers to receive brief 90-minute training and found an impact 3 months later on the fairness of trained managers as perceived by lower-performing employees. Richter and colleagues (2016) designed a procedural justice training program for framing the delivery of bad news and found that trained managers were viewed as fairer and mitigated negative reactions associated with receiving bad news.

The workplace literature (see, e.g., DeCremer and Tyler, 2005 ) also identifies individual characteristics that are reliably associated with variations in perceived procedural justice. When people are more centrally focused upon their status and identity or when they draw more of their sense of themselves from membership and status in a group (e.g., because they strongly identify with it), they are more affected by their treatment. An explanation proposed to account for this association is that treatment communicates information about status and standing. Social scientists label such information relational because it communicates information relevant to social identity ( Tyler and Lind, 1992 ).

The literature on social identity ( Abrams and Hogg, 1988 ; Tyler and Blader, 2000 ) indicates that identification can be directly shaped by organizational structures and leader actions, suggesting another avenue for potential change management. In other words, these individual characteristics reflect variations in the nature of people’s connection to their community and to institutions in the community. Such connections are malleable and can be changed in a variety of ways.

When people receive feedback indicating either that their standing in a community is high or that the status of the community itself is high (or both), they are more likely to identify with that community. And as people identify more strongly with the community, they are more affected by whether or not they are treated justly, since such treatment communicates social identity–relevant information and their identities are more strongly intertwined with the community. Hence, a general approach to amplifying the role of procedural justice in the evaluation of community authorities is to strengthen the identification of residents with their community. This logic model also highlights the reciprocal influences of procedural justice and social identification upon one another. Procedural justice promotes identification of community members with both authorities and institutions ( Tyler and Blader, 2000 ). Identification, in turn, leads to a greater emphasis

on procedural justice when reacting to authorities. Both of these processes evolve and interact over time.

Evidence on Procedural Justice in Policing

Many of the ideas mentioned in the community-oriented policing literature reviewed above in this chapter are similar to ideas in the procedural justice research literature, in the sense that the focus is on the experiences of people in the community and on their behavior toward the police. Despite these similarities in conceptualization, studies of community-oriented policing have, as noted above, seldom directly assessed perceptions of procedural justice or injustice of different aspects of community-oriented policing programs. Hence, one clear limitation of the existing studies is the lack of examination of the connection between actual police policies and practices and measures of the different intervening psychological constructs outlined in the logic model. The committee therefore cannot draw upon the large community-oriented policing literature for guidance in this area.

On the other hand, in comparison to community policing studies that measure procedural justice, there is a larger policing literature that begins with perceived procedural justice and looks at its consequences ( Donner et al., 2015 ). Although issues of causality and third (potentially confounding) variables remain open questions, a number of studies that measure associations among perceptions, either through a cross-sectional design or using panel designs involving interviews with members of the public, find statistically significant correlations between perceived procedural justice, perceptions of legitimacy, compliance, and cooperation. 14

Several studies of policing suggest that procedural justice policing is

14 There have been a wide variety of approaches used to assess compliance, with most studies relying upon self-report of behavior. Cooperation has also been studied in a variety of ways. A typical approach has been to ask people if they would cooperate in an appropriate situation if one arose. For example, if called, would they serve on a jury? If they witnessed a crime, would they report it? See Bates, Allen, and Watson (2016) ; Bond and Gow (1996) ; Bradford (2011) ; Bradford et al. (2014 , 2015 ); Casper, Tyler, and Fisher (1988) ; Dai, Frank, and Sun (2011) ; Elliott, Thomas, and Ogloff (2011) ; Fagan and Piquero (2007) ; Fagan and Tyler (2005) ; Gau and Brunson (2010 , 2015 ); Goff, Epstein, and Reddy (2013) ; Hinds (2007 , 2009 ); Hinds and Murphy (2007) ; Hasisi and Weisburd (2011) ; Jackson et al. (2012 , 2013 ); Jonathan-Zamir and Weisburd (2013) ; Kane (2005) ; Mastrofski, Snipes, and Supina (1996) ; McCluskey (2003) ; Murphy (2005 , 2013 ); Murphy, Hinds, and Fleming (2008) ; Myhill and Bradford (2012) ; Myhill and Quinton (2011) ; Norman (2009) ; Piquero, Gomez-Smith, and Langton (2004) ; Reisig and Lloyd (2009) ; Reisig, Tankebe, and Mesko (2014) ; Stott, Hoggett, and Pearson (2012) ; Sunshine and Tyler (2003) ; Tankebe (2013) ; Taylor and Lawton (2012) ; Tyler (1988 , 2000 , 2006 , 2009 , 2011 ); Tyler and Blader (2005) ; Tyler, Casper, and Fisher (1989) ; Tyler and Fagan (2008) ; Tyler, Fagan, and Geller (2014) ; Tyler and Huo (2002) ; Tyler and Jackson (2014) ; Tyler et al. (2007) ; Tyler, Schulhofer, and Huq (2010) ; Tyler and Wakslak (2004) ; Ward et al. (2011) ; Watson and Angell (2013) ; Wolfe et al. (2016) .

strongly correlated with community members’ perceptions of legitimacy and their cooperation with police. For example, Donner and colleagues (2015) reviewed 28 studies and concluded that police interactions with the public that are informed by concepts of procedural justice are positively correlated with public views of police legitimacy and with trust in the police. This conclusion is supported by studies that use either subjective (i.e., citizen-experienced; see Mazerolle et al., 2013b ; Wolfe et al., 2016 ) or objective (researcher-assessed) measures ( Dai, Frank, and Sun, 2011 ; Mastrofski, Snipes, and Supina, 1996 ; Mazerolle et al., 2013a ) of citizen cooperation. It also correlates positively with deference to police authority as reported in surveys ( Tyler and Huo, 2002 ; Tyler and Fagan, 2008 ). At the same time, there is little evidence of correlation between objective procedural justice behaviors and citizen outcomes ( Nagin and Telep, 2017 ). Indeed, only one study ( Worden and McLean, 2014 ) compared objective versus subjective measures of procedural justice behaviors, and it found only a small, albeit statistically significant, correlation. 15 That study also found that procedurally unjust behavior is more critical to evaluations than procedurally just behavior. These findings are consistent with Skogan’s (2006a) work suggesting that negative citizen/police encounters are far more consequential for citizen attitudes toward the police than positive encounters.

This is not to say that positive encounters cannot build trust; studies show that they can. Tyler and Fagan (2008) used a panel study design to demonstrate that fair contacts were found to be statistically significantly associated with increased trust among those with contact with the New York City Police Department, although negative contacts had a stronger influence. Tyler, Fagan, and Geller (2014) used a similar panel design but focused upon 18 - to 26-year-olds in New York City. They found that both fair and unfair contacts were associated with changes in perceived legitimacy, and both were equally influential.

Several recent experimental studies explore the impact of procedurally just treatment on citizen attitudes toward the police, as well as their cooperative behavior. These studies do not at this time provide a clear conclusion regarding whether procedural justice policing improves perceptions of police legitimacy and cooperation. Mazerolle and colleagues (2013b) conducted one such study focusing upon police stops in Australia. They found that a single-stop experience that the civilian viewed as reflecting procedural justice or injustice generalized to shape trust in the police in the community. This study, called the Queensland Community Engagement Trial, was a randomized controlled trial that delivered an experimental treatment to each

15 In this study, the categories used by observers were drawn from theories about procedural justice. Similarly, the dimensions of citizen perception assessed were drawn from those same theories.

stopped civilian in the form of a scripted set of officer statements during traffic checks for drunk driving. Randomly chosen officers were trained to follow a detailed protocol designed to maximize the procedural justice of the brief interactions occasioned by random breath testing (RBT). Reactions to those officers were compared with the reactions to officers not trained using this special script. Scripts were designed to incorporate the elements of procedural justice into officers’ statements during the stop. During 30 of 60 RBT operations, officers were directed to use the experimental script, and senior officers monitored their compliance with the statements listed in the protocol. These police-citizen encounters were quite brief: ordinarily (i.e., in the control condition), they were “very systematic and often devoid of anything but compulsory communication” ( Mazerolle et al., 2013b , p. 40). The control-condition encounter was about 20 seconds in duration and did not have the procedural justice statements. The scripted, procedurally just encounters were longer, at 97 seconds on average, but still quite brief. Each driver who was stopped during these 60 RBT encounters was given a survey to complete later and return to the researchers. The procedural justice treatment had the hypothesized impact on civilians’ judgments. However, response rates, for both experimental and control drivers, were only about 13 percent. This low rate of return raised concerns about the strength and generalizability of the findings.

The design of the Queensland Community Engagement Trial, but not its results, has been replicated in other settings ( MacQueen and Bradford, 2015 ; Sahin, 2014 ). MacQueen and Bradford (2015) used a block-randomized design with pre- and post-test measures built around a similar type of police-civilian experience. Their treatment was also a stop procedure that involved the presentation of key messages and subsequent distribution of a leaflet to motorists, through which they evaluated their experience. The study found no significant improvements in general trust in the police or in perceived police legitimacy. 16 Similarly, a recent experiment using traffic stops in Turkey ( Sahin et al., 2016 ) found that officer behavior during traffic stops shaped views about the particular police officers involved but did not generalize to overall perceptions about the traffic police as an organization. And Lowrey, Maguire, and Bennett (2016) , who studied street stops by having observers view video clips of police and civilian actions and verbal statements during traffic stops, found an impact upon specific evaluations of the stop, including obligation to obey the particular officers and having trust and confidence in those officers, but not on generalizations to broader attitudes about the police as an organization.

16 The committee notes that the failure of the study may be due to implementation errors and does not necessarily suggest that the theory informing procedural justice is wrong (>MacQueen and Bradford, 2016).

These particular forms of police contact are all highly scripted and therefore do not vary in the ways that other forms of police contact do. They do reflect the highly scripted nature of traffic stops. Worden and McLean (2016 , p. 34) commented: “Traffic checkpoints that involve very brief encounters between police and citizens are susceptible to such prescriptions, but police–citizen encounters in most domains of police work—and especially in those with the strong potential for contentious interactions—do not lend themselves to such experimental or administrative manipulation.” Studies of the police emphasize that the police normally deal with a wide variety of situations many of which are less scripted, and different officers have very different styles of addressing each type of situation ( Muir, 1977 ). More specifically, Epp, Maynard-Moody, and Haider-Markel (2014) argued that it is investigatory street stops, not traffic stops, that are central to creating feelings of injustice among community residents, since traffic stops are routinized and linked to understandable violations of known laws, whereas citizens stopped on the street are often confused about what, if anything, they have done to justify the stop. Hence, traffic stops are much less likely to create variations in perceived unfairness in treatment on the part of civilians who have contact with police officers and hence are less likely to have an impact on perceived legitimacy.

In the case of assessing impact on cooperation, Mazerolle and colleagues (2013c) created a combined measure of self-reported behavioral ongoing compliance and future willingness to cooperate. They evaluated five experimental studies that provided eight outcome measures. In three of eight cases there is a statistically significant influence of police intervention upon compliance/cooperation. Mazerolle and colleagues (2013c, p. 261) concluded that the results suggest that the “interventions had [a] large, significant, positive association with a combined measure of compliance and cooperation.” Another study by Mazerolle and colleagues (2014) contains an extended meta-analysis on procedural justice effects. In reviewing community policing efforts with procedural justice elements, the authors found four studies exploring influence upon compliance/cooperation and reported three statistically significant relationships in the expected direction (Mazerolle et al., p. 28). Experiencing fairness promotes compliance and cooperation. For restorative justice conferencing, they found four studies that examined influence on compliance/cooperation and four statistically significant relationships (Mazerolle et al., p. 29). The authors concluded that procedural justice has positive effects upon perceived legitimacy and that procedural justice and perceived legitimacy jointly shape self-reported compliance/cooperation. 17

17 Other studies also find an influence on cooperation ( Hinds, 2009 ; McLean and Wolfe, 2016 ; Murphy, 2013 ; Sunshine and Tyler, 2003 ; Tyler and Fagan, 2008 ; Tyler, Goff, and MacCoun, 2015 ; Van Damme, Pauwels, and Svensson, 2015 ; White, Mulvey, and Dario, 2016 ).

This relatively optimistic conclusion was questioned by Nagin and Telep (2017) , who reviewed the same and also more recent studies. In particular, as has been noted, several recent efforts have failed to replicate the Mazerolle study on traffic stops. In addition, the reviews by Mazerolle and colleagues took a more expansive view of studies that constitute tests of the effects of the perceived legitimacy of the police. They included any study that met other technical inclusion criterion (e.g., reported data required to measure effect sizes) and that either had as one purpose improving perceived police legitimacy or articulated an objective that was consistent with Tyler’s conception of procedurally just treatment.

In light of these issues affecting the evidence base, the committee agreed that a strong conclusion regarding the impacts of procedural justice policing on people’s evaluations of police legitimacy (i.e., on perceived legitimacy) or on people’s cooperation with the police could not be drawn from existing studies on the police.

Recent studies suggest that perceived procedural justice may impact identification with the community, social capital, and engagement in the community ( Kochel, 2012 ; Tyler and Jackson, 2014 ). Kochel (2012) studied the police in Trinidad and Tobago through interviews with 2,969 people in 13 police districts and found that the nature of police-citizen interactions was associated with collective efficacy. Collective efficacy is particularly strongly and positively associated with judgments about the quality of police services, a combined measure that includes satisfaction with services and judgments about whether the police are competent, respectful, capable of maintaining order, and willing to help citizens with their problems. 18 Tyler and Jackson (2014) conducted a national survey and found that procedural justice and perceived legitimacy of policing are associated with identification with the community, collective efficacy, and behaviors, such as likelihood of shopping in the community and participating in local politics. These findings suggest that the perceived fairness of policing has an impact beyond the arena of crime and criminal justice—it more broadly affects communities and their well-being.

This literature has several problems. First, it generally begins with community perceptions and evaluations of what the police are doing, rather than using objective, researcher-assessed first-hand accounts of actual police actions. A small number of studies directly connect police actions to perceptions about the police ( Worden and McLean, 2014 ). For example, Mazerolle and colleagues (2013a) conducted a meta-analysis that considers six experimental studies; they concluded that interventions are found to be associated with “large, significant increase in perceptions of procedural

18 Unfortunately, this study does not cleanly distinguish procedures from outcomes because it combines process and outcome measures.

justice” ( Mazerolle et al., 2013a , p. 261). However, the specific police actions associated with this impact are often not clear. This is an important area for further research.

Another example is given by Jonathan-Zamir, Mastrofski, and Moyal (2015) . This field observation of police–citizen interactions measured the relationship between researcher-established measures of the degree of police procedural justice behavior and the observable attitude of the citizen toward the police at the end of the encounter. Observers noted that in half of the 156 observed encounters, citizens manifested behaviors that signaled an attitudinal orientation to the police. They found a strong, statistically significant difference: “encounters in which the officer displayed higher levels of procedural justice were significantly likely to yield overall satisfaction with the police handling of the situation at the encounter’s conclusion” ( Jonathan-Zamir, Mastrofksi, and Moyal, 2015 , p. 862). Of course, displayed attitudes may not reflect how a citizen actually feels, and the study was unable to detect any attitudinal valence for half of the observed citizens.

Worden and McLean (2014) rectified this problem. They compared different aspects of overt police officer behavior, as identified by observers, to citizens’ self-reported perceptions of procedural justice. Using multiple regression analysis, they estimated that the objective ratings could account for only around 10 percent of the variance in subjective perceptions. Procedural injustice had a greater effect on subjective experience. This asymmetry is found to stem not from the relatively strong effects of negative experiences but rather from people’s tendency to overestimate the procedural justice with which the police are acting, as compared to researchers’ objective judgments of how the police are acting. People who deal with the police are generally positive in their ratings of police performance, even when the degree of procedural justice, as rated by observers, is low. The authors suggested that reactions to a specific experience reflect both what happens in that experience and the general attitudes toward the police that people bring into the situation.

Interestingly, the Worden and McLean (2014) findings also indicate that people’s judgments about the propriety of police action are correlated more strongly to perceptions of the procedural justice of police actions than to the actual legality of officers’ behavior. This echoes the results of a recent experimental study that presented people with videos of police-citizen interactions varying in procedural justice ( Meares, Tyler, and Gardener, 2016 ). That study provided contextual information indicating that the officers acted legally or illegally. Also, respondents were presented with scenarios varying in the actual legality of police conduct. These variations had little impact upon judgments about the appropriateness of police actions. Instead, the results indicate that these citizen judgments of police propriety

were primarily driven by the procedural justice of police actions, not by their actual legality.

Finally, Worden and McLean (2014) speculated that the relationship between the police and the public is a reciprocal one. They postulated that if the citizen is disrespectful or resistant, then that can lead the police to use physical force, and when the police use physical force they are then evaluated as less procedurally just. This suggests the potential limitation of studies that do not consider reciprocal influences—a possible limitation in any non-experimental study. The type of contact people have (traffic stop, investigatory stop, call for help, etc.) also shapes ratings of the police. Searches are associated with low ratings of procedural justice.

Procedural Justice and Police Practice

As this review has noted, there have been very few studies in the area of policing that connect police policies and practices and/or the actions of police officers to the perceptions of people in the community about the police. Despite the current lack of direct evidence in the policing arena, evidence exists in other literatures that suggests that developing procedural justice approaches may be possible in the arena of policing. One such area is a substantial body of research consistent with, but by no means conclusive proof of, the hypothesis that procedural justice training may change police behavior in the field. For example, there is research consistent with the idea that officers trained in the principles of procedural justice express more support for using procedural justice when dealing with people in the community than do officers without this training. The trained officers also express stronger commitment to the goals and standards of the organization they work for. Some of this evidence is the result of experimental evaluations of training programs, which can be interpreted as causal evidence (e.g., Schaefer and Hughes, 2016 ; Skogan, Van Craen, and Hennessy, 2015 ). However, the majority of this research is based on correlational analyses of the results of officer surveys, sometimes augmented with objective or third-party performance evaluations ( Bradford et al., 2014 ; DeAngelis and Kupchik, 2007 , 2009 ; Farmer, Beehr, and Love, 2003 ; Taxman and Gordon, 2009 19 ; Trinkner, Tyler, and Goff, 2016 ; Tyler, Callahan, and Frost, 2007 ; Wolfe and Piquero, 2011 ). One should therefore be careful to not attribute a causal interpretation to these findings.

There are also a handful of studies that suggest that officers trained in procedural justice concepts may be more successful at incident de-escalation

19 Taxman and Gordon (2009) survey correctional officers, and we include this study because of the strong relationship between the oversight and enforcement aspect of police and correctional officer’s professional tasks.

in the field ( Wheller et al., 2013 ; Owens et al., 2016 ). One approach to changing police officer behavior is through training officers to use procedural justice in their policing activities. A second approach is to make internal department dynamics more consistent with procedural justice, on the assumption that, as a consequence, officers will adopt these fairer approaches as a general aspect of how they police, without the need for explicit training programs. There is evidence consistent with the suggestion that changes in the internal dynamics of police departments lead to changes in police behavior. When officers experience their superiors in their own departments as being procedurally fair, they are perceived to be fairer in their actions when dealing with the public, they express more support for using procedural justice when dealing with people in the community, and they are less likely to engage in actions such as the use of force ( Bradford et al., 2014 ; DeAngelis and Kupchik, 2007 , 2009 ; Farmer, Beehr, and Love, 2003 ; Harris and Worden, 2014 ; Taxman and Gordon, 2009 ; Trinkner, Tyler, and Goff, 2016 ; Tyler, Callahan, and Frost, 2007 ; Wolfe and Piquero, 2011 ).

The research literature on interventions that take a community-based approach concentrates on three main strategies for proactive policing: community-oriented policing, broken windows policing, and procedural justice policing. The committee reviewed each of these strategies in terms of the evidence for associations with and causal impacts on community outcomes. Given the focus in the logic model for each of these strategies on altering community perceptions and behavior, there is a surprisingly limited research literature on community outcomes.

Of these three strategies, community-oriented policing has had the most extensive examination of the association of police practices with community outcomes. Nonetheless, as we noted in the beginning of the chapter, it is difficult to draw very strong conclusions from this literature. The nature of the benefits of community views of police and policing is ambiguous because there is inconsistency across studies in the conceptualization and measurement of different community outcomes. For example, measures that are presented as indicators of citizen satisfaction with police practices in one study are considered indicators of perceived legitimacy in another. This ambiguity makes the synthesis of findings across studies challenging because researchers do not apply a consistent or standardized set of measures for a given outcome.

A fundamental challenge for understanding the implications of evaluations of community-oriented policing is the great variation exhibited in the content of community-oriented policing elements (or tactics) that comprise the actual intervention evaluated. The range of elements, how they are spe-

cifically accomplished, and the intensity with which they are implemented vary tremendously from study site to study site. Many evaluations give short shrift to the implementation issue, yet those that have examined it in depth have found such challenges to be profound, implicating this as a source of the heterogeneity of effects that have been observed. The absence of a standardized framework for developing a meaningful taxonomy of community-oriented policing practices employed in actual interventions prevents the committee from identifying with confidence specific features, much less combinations of features, that contribute to stronger positive community impacts. Moreover, very few studies of community-oriented policing have traced its long-term effects (beyond a year) on community outcomes or its jurisdictionwide consequences. Therefore, it is difficult to say with confidence what long-term exposure to community-oriented policing produces in community reactions across the full jurisdiction. Understanding and explaining long-term trajectories of community impacts requires monitoring program implementation fidelity over time, as well as monitoring an array of forces and events that originate outside the program and the police organization.

With these limitations in mind, the committee drew the following conclusions from its review of the community-oriented policing research literature.

CONCLUSION 6-1 Community-oriented policing leads to modest improvements in the public’s view of policing and the police in the short term. (Very few studies of community-oriented policing have traced its long-term effects on community outcomes or its jurisdictionwide consequences.) These improvements occur with greatest consistency for measures of community satisfaction and less so for measures of perceived disorder, fear of crime, and police legitimacy. Evaluations of community-oriented policing rarely find “backfire” effects on community attitudes. Hence, the deployment of community-oriented policing as a proactive strategy seems to offer prospects for modest gains at little risk of negative consequences.

CONCLUSION 6-2 Due to the small number of studies, mixed findings, and methodological limitations, no conclusion can be drawn about the impact of community-oriented policing on collective efficacy and citizen cooperative behavior.

Broken windows policing is often evaluated directly in terms of its short-term crime-control impacts. We have emphasized in this report that the broken windows policing model seeks to alter the community’s levels of fear and collective efficacy as a method of enhancing community social

controls and reducing crime in the long run. While this is a key element of the broken windows policing model, the committee’s review showed that these outcomes are seldom examined. In the case of collective efficacy, only one study reported an outcome on this issue, and the committee did not believe that this evidence was persuasive enough to draw a conclusion. In the case of fear of crime, a larger number of studies were available.

CONCLUSION 6-3 The committee is not able to draw a conclusion regarding the impacts of broken windows policing on fear of crime or collective efficacy. This is due in part to the surprisingly small number of studies that examine the community outcomes of broken windows policing and in part to the mixed effects observed.

Procedural justice policing relies on a logic model that posits that perceptions of police legitimacy are primarily responsive to community members’ evaluations of the procedural justice that people experience when dealing with authorities. Procedural justice involves judgments about how fairly: (1) decisions are made and (2) people are treated. The procedural justice model of perceived legitimacy has received empirical support in psychological studies conducted in laboratory settings. The procedural justice model has also received empirical support from studies conducted by organizational psychologists in work settings. The key question for the committee is whether the relationships found in these domains can be extended to the domain of proactive policing practices in real-world communities. While there is a rapidly growing body of research on the community impacts of procedural justice policing, it is difficult to draw causal inferences from these studies because most existing studies rely on cross-sectional or correlational designs, and there are very few field experiments to clarify the causation underlying observed statistical associations. The committee therefore reached the following general conclusions regarding this question:

CONCLUSION 6-4 In general, studies show that perceptions of procedurally just treatment are strongly and positively associated with subjective evaluations of police legitimacy and cooperation with the police. However, the research base is currently insufficient to draw conclusions about whether procedurally just policing causally influences either perceived legitimacy or cooperation.

CONCLUSION 6-5 Although the application of procedural justice concepts to policing is relatively new, there are more extensive literatures on procedural justice in social psychology, in management, and with other legal authorities such as the courts. Those studies are often designed in ways that make causal inferences more compelling, and

results in those areas suggest that the application of procedural justice concepts to policing has promise and that further studies are needed to examine the degree to which the success of such strategies in those other domains can be replicated in the domain of policing.

While Conclusion 6-4 may appear to be at odds with a growing movement to encourage procedurally just behavior among the police (see, e.g., President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, 2015 ), the committee stresses that a finding that we did not have evidence to support the expected outcomes of procedural justice policing is different from finding that such outcomes do not exist. The extant literature in this area is sparse and has only begun to develop in recent years, and the evidence from this small group of existing studies is simply not consistent enough for the committee to draw a stronger conclusion. At the same time, the principles of procedural justice are likely to be consistent with many of the goals of policing in democratic societies, a subject discussed further in Chapter 3 of this report. What is missing to date is information on the extent to which these principles will affect community attitudes toward the police as well as individuals’ cooperation with the police. On the other hand, studies generally do not find negative effects of pursuing procedural justice strategies, suggesting that there is little likelihood of undermining existing trust in the police or otherwise undermining policing through implementing these approaches (although, as we suggested in Chapter 3 , they may raise other concerns about legality and transparency not yet explored in the empirical literature).

This page intentionally left blank.

Proactive policing, as a strategic approach used by police agencies to prevent crime, is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. It developed from a crisis in confidence in policing that began to emerge in the 1960s because of social unrest, rising crime rates, and growing skepticism regarding the effectiveness of standard approaches to policing. In response, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, innovative police practices and policies that took a more proactive approach began to develop. This report uses the term "proactive policing" to refer to all policing strategies that have as one of their goals the prevention or reduction of crime and disorder and that are not reactive in terms of focusing primarily on uncovering ongoing crime or on investigating or responding to crimes once they have occurred.

Proactive policing is distinguished from the everyday decisions of police officers to be proactive in specific situations and instead refers to a strategic decision by police agencies to use proactive police responses in a programmatic way to reduce crime. Today, proactive policing strategies are used widely in the United States. They are not isolated programs used by a select group of agencies but rather a set of ideas that have spread across the landscape of policing.

Proactive Policing reviews the evidence and discusses the data and methodological gaps on: (1) the effects of different forms of proactive policing on crime; (2) whether they are applied in a discriminatory manner; (3) whether they are being used in a legal fashion; and (4) community reaction. This report offers a comprehensive evaluation of proactive policing that includes not only its crime prevention impacts but also its broader implications for justice and U.S. communities.

Welcome to OpenBook!

You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.

Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features?

Show this book's table of contents , where you can jump to any chapter by name.

...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one.

Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.

Switch between the Original Pages , where you can read the report as it appeared in print, and Text Pages for the web version, where you can highlight and search the text.

To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter .

Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email.

View our suggested citation for this chapter.

Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available.

Get Email Updates

Do you enjoy reading reports from the Academies online for free ? Sign up for email notifications and we'll let you know about new publications in your areas of interest when they're released.

  • Bipolar Disorder
  • Therapy Center
  • When To See a Therapist
  • Types of Therapy
  • Best Online Therapy
  • Best Couples Therapy
  • Best Family Therapy
  • Managing Stress
  • Sleep and Dreaming
  • Understanding Emotions
  • Self-Improvement
  • Healthy Relationships
  • Student Resources
  • Personality Types
  • Verywell Mind Insights
  • 2023 Verywell Mind 25
  • Mental Health in the Classroom
  • Editorial Process
  • Meet Our Review Board
  • Crisis Support

Overview of the Problem-Solving Mental Process

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

problem solving approach in community

Rachel Goldman, PhD FTOS, is a licensed psychologist, clinical assistant professor, speaker, wellness expert specializing in eating behaviors, stress management, and health behavior change.

problem solving approach in community

  • Identify the Problem
  • Define the Problem
  • Form a Strategy
  • Organize Information
  • Allocate Resources
  • Monitor Progress
  • Evaluate the Results

Frequently Asked Questions

Problem-solving is a mental process that involves discovering, analyzing, and solving problems. The ultimate goal of problem-solving is to overcome obstacles and find a solution that best resolves the issue.

The best strategy for solving a problem depends largely on the unique situation. In some cases, people are better off learning everything they can about the issue and then using factual knowledge to come up with a solution. In other instances, creativity and insight are the best options.

It is not necessary to follow problem-solving steps sequentially, It is common to skip steps or even go back through steps multiple times until the desired solution is reached.

In order to correctly solve a problem, it is often important to follow a series of steps. Researchers sometimes refer to this as the problem-solving cycle. While this cycle is portrayed sequentially, people rarely follow a rigid series of steps to find a solution.

The following steps include developing strategies and organizing knowledge.

1. Identifying the Problem

While it may seem like an obvious step, identifying the problem is not always as simple as it sounds. In some cases, people might mistakenly identify the wrong source of a problem, which will make attempts to solve it inefficient or even useless.

Some strategies that you might use to figure out the source of a problem include :

  • Asking questions about the problem
  • Breaking the problem down into smaller pieces
  • Looking at the problem from different perspectives
  • Conducting research to figure out what relationships exist between different variables

2. Defining the Problem

After the problem has been identified, it is important to fully define the problem so that it can be solved. You can define a problem by operationally defining each aspect of the problem and setting goals for what aspects of the problem you will address

At this point, you should focus on figuring out which aspects of the problems are facts and which are opinions. State the problem clearly and identify the scope of the solution.

3. Forming a Strategy

After the problem has been identified, it is time to start brainstorming potential solutions. This step usually involves generating as many ideas as possible without judging their quality. Once several possibilities have been generated, they can be evaluated and narrowed down.

The next step is to develop a strategy to solve the problem. The approach used will vary depending upon the situation and the individual's unique preferences. Common problem-solving strategies include heuristics and algorithms.

  • Heuristics are mental shortcuts that are often based on solutions that have worked in the past. They can work well if the problem is similar to something you have encountered before and are often the best choice if you need a fast solution.
  • Algorithms are step-by-step strategies that are guaranteed to produce a correct result. While this approach is great for accuracy, it can also consume time and resources.

Heuristics are often best used when time is of the essence, while algorithms are a better choice when a decision needs to be as accurate as possible.

4. Organizing Information

Before coming up with a solution, you need to first organize the available information. What do you know about the problem? What do you not know? The more information that is available the better prepared you will be to come up with an accurate solution.

When approaching a problem, it is important to make sure that you have all the data you need. Making a decision without adequate information can lead to biased or inaccurate results.

5. Allocating Resources

Of course, we don't always have unlimited money, time, and other resources to solve a problem. Before you begin to solve a problem, you need to determine how high priority it is.

If it is an important problem, it is probably worth allocating more resources to solving it. If, however, it is a fairly unimportant problem, then you do not want to spend too much of your available resources on coming up with a solution.

At this stage, it is important to consider all of the factors that might affect the problem at hand. This includes looking at the available resources, deadlines that need to be met, and any possible risks involved in each solution. After careful evaluation, a decision can be made about which solution to pursue.

6. Monitoring Progress

After selecting a problem-solving strategy, it is time to put the plan into action and see if it works. This step might involve trying out different solutions to see which one is the most effective.

It is also important to monitor the situation after implementing a solution to ensure that the problem has been solved and that no new problems have arisen as a result of the proposed solution.

Effective problem-solvers tend to monitor their progress as they work towards a solution. If they are not making good progress toward reaching their goal, they will reevaluate their approach or look for new strategies .

7. Evaluating the Results

After a solution has been reached, it is important to evaluate the results to determine if it is the best possible solution to the problem. This evaluation might be immediate, such as checking the results of a math problem to ensure the answer is correct, or it can be delayed, such as evaluating the success of a therapy program after several months of treatment.

Once a problem has been solved, it is important to take some time to reflect on the process that was used and evaluate the results. This will help you to improve your problem-solving skills and become more efficient at solving future problems.

A Word From Verywell​

It is important to remember that there are many different problem-solving processes with different steps, and this is just one example. Problem-solving in real-world situations requires a great deal of resourcefulness, flexibility, resilience, and continuous interaction with the environment.

Get Advice From The Verywell Mind Podcast

Hosted by therapist Amy Morin, LCSW, this episode of The Verywell Mind Podcast shares how you can stop dwelling in a negative mindset.

Follow Now : Apple Podcasts / Spotify / Google Podcasts

You can become a better problem solving by:

  • Practicing brainstorming and coming up with multiple potential solutions to problems
  • Being open-minded and considering all possible options before making a decision
  • Breaking down problems into smaller, more manageable pieces
  • Asking for help when needed
  • Researching different problem-solving techniques and trying out new ones
  • Learning from mistakes and using them as opportunities to grow

It's important to communicate openly and honestly with your partner about what's going on. Try to see things from their perspective as well as your own. Work together to find a resolution that works for both of you. Be willing to compromise and accept that there may not be a perfect solution.

Take breaks if things are getting too heated, and come back to the problem when you feel calm and collected. Don't try to fix every problem on your own—consider asking a therapist or counselor for help and insight.

If you've tried everything and there doesn't seem to be a way to fix the problem, you may have to learn to accept it. This can be difficult, but try to focus on the positive aspects of your life and remember that every situation is temporary. Don't dwell on what's going wrong—instead, think about what's going right. Find support by talking to friends or family. Seek professional help if you're having trouble coping.

Davidson JE, Sternberg RJ, editors.  The Psychology of Problem Solving .  Cambridge University Press; 2003. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511615771

Sarathy V. Real world problem-solving .  Front Hum Neurosci . 2018;12:261. Published 2018 Jun 26. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2018.00261

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

  • Search Menu
  • Author Guidelines
  • Why Publish
  • Submission Site
  • Reviewer guidelines
  • Open Access
  • About Policing
  • Editorial Board
  • Advertising and Corporate Services
  • Journals Career Network
  • Dispatch Dates
  • Journals on Oxford Academic
  • Books on Oxford Academic

Issue Cover

Article Contents

Introduction, a citizen-centric approach, evaluating the pilot, conclusion and discussion.

  • < Previous

Meaningful interventions: Applying a citizen-centric approach to problem-solving in community policing

ORCID logo

  • Article contents
  • Figures & tables
  • Supplementary Data

Ronald van Steden, Jordi den Hartog, Meaningful interventions: Applying a citizen-centric approach to problem-solving in community policing, Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice , Volume 18, 2024, paae030, https://doi.org/10.1093/police/paae030

  • Permissions Icon Permissions

Citizens generally express confidence in the police organization, but satisfaction with police services can diminish after voluntary contact with an officer. It appears that officers sometimes struggle to understand what citizens expect and need from them. Victims of crime may not necessarily wish to punish an offender; they may just want to be heard and have their problem resolved. In response, the Dutch police have introduced a pilot to provide ‘meaningful interventions’, such as conflict mediation, as a way to bridge institutional and citizen perspectives successfully. This article presents a qualitative evaluation of the pilot by applying the EMMIE framework, which stands for Effect, Mechanisms, Moderators, Implementation, and Economics, to the available data. In conclusion, meaningful interventions show promise in better aligning police service delivery with the needs and expectations of citizens. Future research is necessary to gain a fuller evidence-based analysis of how meaningful interventions work.

As is the case with other police forces across the West ( Home Office, 2023 ), the Dutch constabulary face a peculiar paradox. On the one hand, the police are the most trusted institution in the country. According to Statistics Netherlands, 77% of the population expresses confidence in the police, surpassing confidence in, for example, the press (40%), the parliament (30%), and the church (30%) ( CBS, 2023 ). On the other hand, after there has been personal contact with police officers, public satisfaction with their daily work drops significantly. While most people (64%) still hold positive views about their initial contact when reporting a problem to the police, there is also disappointment with the outcome of this contact. Among those dissatisfied with police contact, 40% complain that their problem has not been resolved ( CBS, 2022 ).

The challenge for (community) police officers is how to best support citizens to deal with problems they report. While officers address various ‘problems the public expect them to solve’ ( Eck and Spelman, 1987 , p. 37), scholarly publications in the field of policing tend to restrict their content to ‘what works’ in reducing (fear of) crime ( Mannings et al. , 2016 ; Moore and Braga, 2003 ). Yet, crime is just one element of public demand for police service. The majority of calls and reports received at police stations involve mental health crises, domestic violence, incidents, accidents, neighbourly disputes, non-criminal behaviour complaints, and requests for help or assistance ( Boulton et al. , 2017 ; Laufs et al. , 2021 ). Such problems require prompt or long-term action and do not necessarily follow a criminal justice logic. Individuals may just need support.

Citizens have high expectations of the actions taken by police, as uniformed officers carry significant symbolic meaning and value. They represent a trustworthy pillar of peace and order that offers people a sense of security in a chaotic world ( Loader, 1997 ; Walker, 1996 ). However, citizens’ personal experiences with the police matter as much, if not more, than symbolic attitudes ( Orr and West, 2007 ). Given that actions taken by officers can frequently be disappointing, a better understanding of police–citizen contact and its outcomes is essential for the development of ‘customised’ or ‘tailor-made’ solutions ( Arlbjørn et al. , 2011 ) that address citizens’ needs. Currently, there is limited knowledge about how these solutions are implemented and appreciated in the context of community policing. When people voluntarily contact the police, subsequent interventions need not only to be ‘just’ and ‘fair’ ( Wells, 2007 ) but also to meet their specific requirements.

Against this background, we introduce and explore the concept of ‘meaningful interventions’ ( betekenisvolle interventies ; Felser et al. , 2017 ), a term coined by the Dutch police. This concept does not suggest that the police primarily engage in meaningless interventions. Rather, it emphasizes the importance of thinking ‘from outside in’ ( Alford and Speed, 2006 ) to better align their service delivery with the interests and expectations of citizens. Police officers are stimulated to find the preferably ‘restorative’ ( Clamp and Paterson, 2017 ) solutions within or outside of the criminal justice system that fit citizens’ intentions and needs best. It is not an institutional-centric approach, but a citizen-centric approach that must be the starting point for police actions and interventions.

The three research questions of our article are: (1) What kind of problems and conflicts do citizens report to the police? (2) What kind of meaningful interventions are offered by the police? and (3) How do citizens and the police assess the practices and outcomes of these interventions? These questions are answered through a pilot evaluation carried out by a specially trained community police officer and a project secretary (second author) under supervision of an academic scholar (first author) and a broader project steering committee. The subsequent section briefly outlines the theoretical background of a ‘client’ (or, more accurately phrased ‘citizen’) focus in policing, followed by an overview of the study’s methodology, analytical framework, and empirical results. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of our findings.

Skogan and Hartnett (1997) identify responsiveness to people’s needs and encouragement of positive relationships between officers and neighbourhood inhabitants in solving local safety problems as core elements of community policing. Under the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy, these scholars and the police organized so-called ‘beat meetings’ to allow groups of voluntary citizens to inform local officers directly about crime and safety issues in their local areas and to build partnerships around solutions. The philosophy behind meaningful interventions ( Felser et al. , 2017 ), as developed within the Dutch police service, takes the ideal of responsive problem-solving one step further by applying individual and individualized attention to citizens who report crime, disorder, nuisance, and conflicts.

The importance of this customization focus deserves a little more elaboration. Although the Dutch police use the terms ‘clients’ and ‘customers’ in official policy documents themselves, this private-sector style jargon creates some unease in relation to the public and regulatory task of the force. Citizens do not directly pay for police services, they are unable to choose among different competing companies, police contact is often involuntary and stressful, and the police do not simply aim to please customers or provide straightforward ‘value-for-money’ ( Alford, 2002 ). Therefore, it seems more appropriate to refer to a ‘citizen’ rather than a ‘client’ approach. Following this citizen-centric approach, as implied in meaningful interventions, does not mean the police should be ‘run like a business’ ( Beckett, 2000 ). Instead, the police should adjust their internal organizational logic towards what citizens need from them.

To illustrate this, let’s consider the fictional example of a fight between two ex-lovers. The victim reports the incident at a local police station. A standard bureaucratic reaction (the ‘institutional-centric approach’) would involve completing a crime report without any assurance of a proper follow-up. In a police view, ‘minor’ relationship disputes are not their priority, making further criminal investigation highly unlikely. This would disappoint the victim, resulting in negative consequences for public satisfaction regarding police contact and, more crucially, undertaking action. Moreover, the criminal justice trajectory is regarded as an ultimum remedium , a last resort, when all other options have failed ( Bittner, 1990 [1970 ]). Overuse of criminal law enforcement serves the interests of neither victims nor offenders.

It is very well possible that the victim in our fictional example has intentions other than mere retribution and deterrence when reporting the incident to the police ( Wemmers, 2002 ). Perhaps she or he wants to put an end to a problem, draw a firm line under it, or ask for advice. Criminal justice responses may not be the best route to follow in addressing this kind of need. Hence, within the constraints of rules, regulations, and directives, community police officers are expected to make ‘discretionary judgement’ in determining how to handle situations and what works best for an individual citizen. Following Lipsky, ‘to a degree, the society seeks not only impartially from its public agencies but also compassion for special circumstances and flexibility in dealing with them’ ( 2010 [1980 ], p. 15). Tailor-made responses are necessary to ‘fit’ a police intervention to specific situations and needs.

Putting people’s problems first sheds another light on how to structurally organize the everyday practices of community policing. As Seddon argues, if organizations are designed ‘to do the “value work’”—what matters to the customer [i.e. the citizen]—and only the value work, cost will fall as service improves’ ( 2017 , p. 31). Pursuing a citizen-centric approach thus seeks to better understand victims’ and offenders’ (or a mix thereof) intentions and needs. This approach should be taken into account in daily police operations through meaningful interventions that contribute to effective problem-solving. Effective problem-solving, in turn, is expected to increase public satisfaction with police and may lead to a variety of other contributions from the general public that create ‘public value’ ( Moore, 1995 ). Think, for example, of providing the police with useful information and compliance with the law.

Examining meaningful interventions

The pilot was conducted between January and October 2022 within the southern district of the Amsterdam police force in the Netherlands ( Den Hartog and Van Steden, 2023 ). The goal was to offer the police a fresh perspective on handling crime reports, with the potential for meaningful interventions and, as anticipated, resolutions addressing citizens’ demands and needs. A community police officer underwent additional training before the pilot intervention. The training, spanning 6 days, focussed on acquiring fundamental negotiating skills, including conversation techniques, decision-making processes, de-escalation tactics, facilitating acceptable solutions between parties, and enhancing awareness of the legal and ethical aspects of mediation. Upon completing the training, the officer received a formal certificate. Moreover, a non-executive (administrative) police practitioner, who also served as the project secretary (the second author of this paper), collected, documented, and analysed the data following the interventions. Prior to participating in the pilot program, citizens provided the police with their consent.

Initially, the project secretary examined eighty meaningful interventions. However, in eight cases, the community police officer decided not to implement the intervention, mostly due to ongoing recidivism among conflicting parties. As a result, she was left with a total of 72 cases. The project secretary interviewed 40 respondents involved in the interventions to gather information about the outcomes in terms of problem resolution and to interview them about their other experiences with the pilot (as also described below). Additionally, he had conversations with the community police officer during and after each case to reflect on the process, time commitment, and outcomes of the interventions. Detailed notes were taken and recorded in his research diary.

The interventions carried out by the community police officer were uniquely tailored to the citizens and the problems they faced. Once an intervention was made, the responsibility for upholding the outcomes rested with the conflicting parties. However, the community officer sometimes needed to follow-up on her interventions to reinforce previous agreements made. This pilot was conducted under the supervision of a project steering committee in which the first author, an academic scholar, took part. The committee, which convened three times, discussed interim findings and assisted the project secretary in structuring and interpreting the data.

Calling citizens back

The project secretary contacted the conflicting parties approximately 2 months after the completion of the intervention. In these telephone conversations, he inquired about how they experienced the intervention and its effect or impact on their current situation. Participation in the interviews was voluntary. We were able to collect qualitative information about 28 cases (39% of the 72 cases, involving 40 respondents) by conducting interviews with at least one of the conflicting parties, resulting in 40 conversations. The evaluation of the remaining 44 cases was impeded by multiple factors, including unresponsiveness from respondents (4 cases), lack of cooperation or denial of responsibility by individuals involved (17 cases), indirect involvement of a community officer (4 cases, where advice was given to a colleague), the risk of reigniting conflicts (9 cases), and ongoing or recently completed cases (10 cases), rendering a comprehensive assessment either impossible or imprudent due to these constraints.

Inspired by the What Works Centre for Crime Reduction in the UK, we analysed our data using the EMMIE framework ( Johnson et al ., 2015 ; Thornton et al. , 2019 ). This framework serves as an analytical toolkit for synthesizing literature reviews and empirical findings from fieldwork and offers a practical format for engaging policymakers and practitioners with scholarly evidence. The acronym EMMIE represents five elements: E ffect (direction and impact size of an intervention), M echanisms (factors that produce specific effects), M oderators (conditions under which variations in outcomes occur), I mplementation (of interventions), and E conomics (cost-benefit analysis of an intervention). The individual items that inform these elements are listed below:

E ffect : What is the impact of interventions on solving citizens’ problems and conflicts?

M echanisms : Which factors contribute to this impact, positively or negatively?

M oderators : What are favourable and unfavourable contexts for interventions to work—or not?

I mplementation : What is necessary for successfully implementing an intervention?

E conomics : How much time did the community police officer spend on the inventions (costs) and how satisfied were the participating citizens with these interventions (benefits)?

Data collection took place by calling back participating citizens and by obtaining reflections from the trained community police officer regarding cases, interventions, and outcomes. The data were grouped under the five elements of EMMIE afterwards. The results of our qualitative pilot evaluation are provided in the next section.

Types of conflicts

Table 1 provides a brief description of the 72 types of conflict that are being investigated. The cases were reported to the police through different channels, particularly intake and service staff, the internal case-screening bureau, and other police colleagues such as community officers. Each case began with citizens reporting a crime or problem to the police. In many instances, police solutions other than strictly criminal justice interventions (investigation, apprehension, and prosecution) were preferred because most conflicting parties knew each other quite well and wanted to restore their disturbed relationship. Additionally, the reported cases often lacked investigative indications such as clear evidence or independent witnesses and would normally be dismissed. However, by contacting the police, citizens did expect that their conflict or problem would be addressed in some way. The anticipated meaningful interventions intended to meet their specific interests and needs.

Types of conflict

Types of interventions

In response to problems and conflicts in local neighbourhoods, the police implemented six types of meaningful intervention, all of which had a restorative component ( Table 2 ). These tailor-made interventions are not infinite in scope and can be grouped under the following categories:

Types of intervention

Consultation: Providing practical and legal advice to the citizen reporting a crime or conflict, guiding them on the best course of action to resolve their problem;

‘Valuable’ conversation: Offering practical advice to enhance citizens’ ability to resolve conflicts themselves.

Reprimand: Issuing a firm warning to make it clear to a suspect that he/she crossed a line, aiming to raise awareness and prevent future unwanted behaviour;

Specific deterrence conversation: Delivering an oral and/or written notice to demand that a suspect immediately cease his/her (allegedly) illegal action;

Shuttle mediation: Assisting disputing parties in reaching an agreement (reconciliation, settlement, or compromise) outside of the criminal justice system, without requiring direct physical contact between them;

Face-to-face mediation: Facilitating a resolution between disputing parties by bringing them physically together outside of the criminal justice system.

Within these categories, the community officer had much room to manoeuvre in making decisions. There were no clear correlations between the type of conflict and the chosen intervention in response.

A majority (77%) of our respondents involved in 24 cases ( N  = 35; for 5 respondents, it was too early to judge any effects) gave positive feedback regarding the police interventions. They had experienced progress or a settlement of their problem and praised the ‘constructive’ police contacts, the ‘added value’ of police involvement, and the ‘beneficial impact’ of the community officer. Respondents specifically felt ‘reassured’ and ‘at peace’ after the officer’s interventions:

I am very pleased with the community officer. My situation has been solved through a restorative intervention. (Respondent #11) After the first specific deterrence letter, there was no contact whatsoever between us. Yet, at the beginning of this year, a photo of me was sent to the other party. This was likely a trigger to re-establish contact again. The community police officer has spoken to both of us and communicated the outcomes. [. . .] It has been quiet again ever since. (Respondent #13) When something happened, I looked at my own role and felt shame: how could I have been so stupid? Now that feeling has been straightened out in the contact with the community officer. The shame has been removed. (Respondent #23) The community officer provided valuable advice and support. I am now better equipped to stand my ground, for example, by saying, ‘and now it is over’. [. . .] I feel also reassured because I used to be afraid that new situations would arise. (Respondent #30)

However, according to other respondents, the impact of interventions was less effective or sustainable than anticipated. In eight cases, they reported a lack of effects. Situations had not changed or could escalate again:

The community police officer provided advice and reassurance, but ultimately [. . .] the situation did not change. (Respondent #1) The sustainability of the agreement is not assured. It should have been written down. The outcome is too non-committal now. (Respondent #20)

It is thus important to note that tailor-made police interventions, designed to meet citizens’ needs and settle their situations, are not a panacea.

Our respondents mentioned five main mechanisms for achieving a positive effect resulting from police interventions. These mechanisms are complex and may interfere with each other, but for the sake of clarity, we present them separately. The first mechanism refers to the police time made available for constructive contact:

I liked the fact that there was time to discuss the situation despite time pressures and staff shortages. (Respondent #3) I liked the fact that I could directly text the police officer on her phone. There was time for personal contact, which simulated a sense of trust. (Respondent #22)

Respondents described the community police officer as ‘discrete’, ‘friendly’, and ‘professional’. One felt that covert conflict mediation was much preferable over an invasive ‘bunch of uniformed officers on my doorstep’ (Respondent #14).

Secondly, offering tailor-made interventions has contributed to greater clarity about what the police could or could not do for citizens, particularly those who were having their first contact with the police:

It was the first time I was in contact with the police. So, it was all new. (Respondent #37)

Respondent #9 added that she had reported a crime to the police before but had not heard anything since. She now knows that something is happening with her case, which has restored her confidence in the police. However, because the search for ‘meaningful interventions’ was not (and is still not) part of the standard police repertoire, citizens sometimes felt uncertain about potential financial costs and legal consequences. A few respondents (#5 and #8) were caught by surprise by the telephone call from the police offering them an alternative conflict settlement.

Thirdly, the respondents mentioned the ‘knowledge’, ‘expertise’, and ‘decisiveness’ of the community police officer. They described her as a ‘go-getter’ as she prevented conversations from devolving into mere ‘yes-no-discussions’. In addition, the community officer effectively calmed parties down when tensions escalated due to differing viewpoints:

[It] was very nice [. . .] that steps were taken. The community police officer was understanding, listened well, and acted professionally. (Respondent #13) The community police officer was incredibly committed. [. . .] She did not let frictions put her off. [. . .] Whether left or right, she tried to guide and restore contact with the conflicting party. (Respondent #15) The case was settled thanks to the quality of the community police officer. She managed to [. . .] find a smart way forward. (Respondent #16)

Fourthly, the community officer provided practical advice on how conflicting parties could adequately respond to a conflict. She discussed the pros and cons of potential actions and ensured that promises and agreements among conflicting parties were upheld. In 12 of our cases, consideration was given to financial compensation for damages. Ultimately, such compensation was disbursed in only four cases. It is important to note that agreeing on financial settlements was always voluntary. In instances where citizens denied personal responsibility for losses or property damages, no compensation was awarded.

A fifth and final mechanism that helped to carry solutions forward was the community police officer involving third parties in the equation. For example, in cases of domestic disputes, she made contact with Safe at Home ( Veilig Thuis ), a Dutch non-profit social support organization for people in conflict situations such as domestic violence and abuse:

I started a trajectory with Safe at Home. The community police officer also made a connection. It’s a good thing this has been done. [. . .] Advice has been given on the next steps. (Respondent #9)

This kind of collaboration between police and third parties contributed to more comprehensive case files that could be used for undertaking further action by police or by others. Meaningful interventions thus provided a clearer overview of conflict situations.

The interventions carried out by the community police officer took place within a broader social context, which influenced the observed outcomes. Apart from the mechanisms discussed above, the circumstances under which the police must operate had an impact, whether intended or unintended, on the effectiveness of these interventions. While it was impossible to accurately evaluate the interactions between mechanisms, moderating factors, and their potential effects, engaging in reflective conversations with the community police officer yielded some general insights.

According to her perspective, the circumstances were deemed ideal when the parties in conflict were familiar with each other and the conflict had begun relatively recently. Whether they were family members, friends, business associates, or neighbours, if the likelihood of future interaction was high, it often, though not invariably, fostered receptiveness to restorative and other non-punitive interventions. Additionally, it was preferable for the number of involved parties to be limited. Among our cases, 61 instances comprised conflicts between two individuals or between multiple individuals belonging to two conflicting groups or households, encompassing the vast majority (total N  = 72). In 11 cases, 3 or more individuals were involved. While most conflicts tend to be short-lived, 13 of our cases had persisted for several years. In these prolonged conflicts, where parties had entrenched themselves in a recurring ‘fighting attitude’, achieving transformation was particularly challenging. Meaningful interventions seemed less effective here.

A related observation was that meaningful interventions were most likely to succeed when the conflicts were not overly complicated and lacked criminal justice entanglements or solutions. The presence of physical harm most probably increases the occurrence of suboptimal outcomes. While we did not encounter cases in which individuals displayed erratic behaviour or other forms of psychological instability, it was conceivable that such circumstances could also undermine the effectiveness of police interventions. Participants needed to exhibit a certain level of rationality to fully engage in the pilot. Otherwise, a referral to public or mental health institutions might be a more viable option.

Implementation

The implementation of interventions refers to how things are done to produce successful outcomes. Police colleagues involved in responding to reported conflicts and problems, along with the trained community officers, made decisions about cases suitable for alternative interventions by taking into account their context, history, and complexity (moderators). If cases appeared promising, the community officer or her police colleagues contacted citizens to inform them about their options and to seek their consent to participate in the pilot. External parties that played a role included housing associations in cases of neighbourhood disputes and Safe at Home in cases of domestic problems. The police occasionally collaborated with these partners on issues such as behavioural agreements.

Regarding citizens involved, telephone contact was crucial for discussing cases on short notice. The community police officer, in consultation with the conflicting parties, sometimes chose to continue with phone contact (so-called ‘shuttle mediations’). In other instances, people received a formal letter inviting them to a personal meeting at the police station. Almost everyone responded to this invitation. Customization was continuously the focal point of interventions: What did citizens need? Where had citizens been most helped, and how could support be achieved?

Just like customization, thoroughness was an important factor in the implementation process. This applied to both the preparation and execution of the interventions. Well-prepared initial meetings with the citizens were crucial to identify the relevant factors that had led to their conflicts. It was also important that participants had enough time to consider their options. As shown in Table 3 , during the pilot period, half of the 72 cases had a lead time of approximately 1 month, and 89% of the cases were resolved within two months. A ‘quick fix’ was often not a viable option.

The lead time of cases

Nevertheless, despite the community police officer’s efforts, not all respondents reacted positively to her interventions. One respondent (#13) believed that the situation was too complicated to be satisfactorily discussed in just half an hour. In his opinion, the community officer did not get the complete picture. Two others (#1 and #5) expressed criticism regarding the officer’s approach towards considering the interests of suspects. As victims, they felt that their interests should have been prioritized. Respondent #10 expressed frustration because his neighbours were not willing to participate in a restorative conversation. The principle of voluntariness may hinder the effective implementation of tailor-made solutions.

There are costs and benefits associated with police interventions. However, estimating these is an extremely complex task. To provide a general impression, we first calculated the time spent on the meaningful interventions. Our calculations included the following components: preparation and administration, telephone contact, and/or in-person conversations at the police station. Table 4 provides an overview of the average time consumption related to the various interventions.

Average hours spent on interventions

It can be argued that meaningful interventions cost the police less time (and budget) compared to the traditional route of reporting a crime, filing a report, screening this report, and taking criminal justice action—or not. Furthermore, if the police do postpone a case, this may result in double handling. As a respondent explained:

When reporting a crime to the police, I expected that they would address my case. And had I not been satisfied, I would have made another report. (Respondent #30)

In addition, failing to intervene in a conflict situation could lead to escalation, resulting in even more police work and harm caused to those involved:

If the police do nothing, there is the possibility of vigilantism: taking the law into one’s own hands. My brother had found out a lot about the perpetrator. Action by the community officer had a de-escalating effect. (Respondent #9) The police intervention likely prevented a worsening situation of noise pollution. [. . .] If the conflict had persisted, it would have further deteriorated the atmosphere. (Respondent #11)

In our analysis of the pilot’s ‘benefits’, we evaluated these kinds of ‘costs’ in relation to citizen satisfaction with the meaningful interventions. Their feedback was generally promising. In 22 out of the 28 cases, 34 respondents answered the question regarding their satisfaction with the mediator on a scale of 1–10 (it was decided to include this question after six interviews had already been conducted). This yielded an average rating of 8.1, with 2 respondents giving unsatisfactory ratings. Here are three examples of positive comments:

I already had trust in the police but have become even more positive about them. (Respondent #15) I would probably not have gotten that far without help of the police. [. . .] The situation was handled just fine. (Respondent #18) I did not realise that conflict mediation was an option too. It really helped me. (Respondent #27)

We can thus cautiously conclude that the cost-benefit balance of meaningful interventions looks favourable. Interventions seem ‘cheaper’ (i.e. cost less police time) than traditional criminal justice trajectories and strengthen trust in and satisfaction (benefits) with the police.

There exists a gap between the general public’s confidence in the police as a government agency and their personal trust and satisfaction with their experiences of voluntary police contact. Citizens rank the police as a highly trusted state institution, but they can frequently become disappointed and frustrated when the police fail to take adequate action to address their public safety concerns. This discrepancy is worrisome because a lack of trust and confidence in the police can erode the perceived legitimacy of law enforcement and reduce public support for their actions. Consequently, people may become less willing to cooperate with the police and share information about crimes or suspects ( Home Office, 2023 ).

In addition to investment in community engagement as a means of improving problem-solving and enhancing public perceptions of the police ( Skogan and Hartnett, 1997 ), the Dutch police conducted experiments with ‘meaningful interventions’ ( Felser et al. , 2017 ) designed in accordance with a citizen-centric perspective. This tailor-made approach differs from the traditional police way of working, which is rooted in criminal justice responses ( Bittner, 1990 [1970 ]). Such responses are not always effective because citizens may not consistently report crimes, or they may be unwilling to seek prosecution and punishment for the offender ( Wemmers, 2002 ). Instead, they may be seeking help, support, and advice. It is thus vital for the police to better understand these intentions and needs.

In our study of a pilot project in the Netherlands, we found that people frequently contacted the police regarding neighbour quarrels, youth problems, relational conflicts, and various other types of disputes. These problems were, at times, grave and harmful, but people did not necessarily advocate for harsh criminal justice sanctions. Their main preference was to stop or resolve the conflicts and restore broken relationships with spouses, neighbours, or business partners. In response, the Dutch police provided consultations, valuable conversations, reprimands, specific deterrence conversations, shuttle mediations, and face-to-face mediations. All interventions were designed to best meet the expectations, interests, and needs of the people involved in the pilot.

Our qualitative evaluation of the meaningful interventions revealed that, in general, these interventions had a positive effect on the situations: respondents felt ‘reassured’ and more ‘at peace’ after seeing progress in their situations. Possible factors contributing to positive effects included the availability of time to listen to people’s stories and explain what the police can and cannot do, the community officer’s decisiveness in taking appropriate action, and the involvement of third parties such as social support services if necessary. Meaningful interventions seem most effective when a limited number of conflicting parties are familiar with each other, conflicts are not prolonged or too severe, participation is voluntary, and the parties demonstrate an appropriate level of rationality and willingness to resolve their disputes. ‘Customisation’ (tailor-made solutions) and ‘thoroughness’ (good preparation) are key factors in implementing these interventions, which, at first glance, appear to be cost-effective compared to criminal justice processes.

However, when viewed critically, meaningful interventions can also lead to an increased police workload. In the absence of the pilot study, the police are typically less inclined to follow-up on reports of neighbour conflicts and other minor quarrels unless they escalate. Additionally, not every participant in the pilot felt fully satisfied because their situations remained vulnerable. Some respondents also expressed concerns that the community officers spent too little time on their cases, had uncertainties regarding the economic and legal implications of the meaningful interventions, or, as self-proclaimed victims, criticized the restorative justice premise that victims and offenders should voluntarily engage in an equal dialogue.

One limitation of our pilot study is the sample size of 72 cases, which may not be representative of the full range of cases that police typically encounter for potential meaningful interventions. The cases we studied were only those that happened to occur during the pilot study’s timeframe. Furthermore, we could only gather information from respondents in 38% of the 72 cases. This may introduce a ‘positive bias’ ( Quingley et al. , 2015 ) towards meaningful interventions, as it is conceivable that less enthusiastic or non-cooperative participants in the pilot were more likely to not talk about their experiences.

To go beyond the perceptions of respondents, future research should aim to provide more robust evidence about ‘what works’ in offering meaningful interventions. Consider the use of quantified ‘randomised controlled trials’ ( Knutsson and Tompson, 2017 ) in which two groups of citizens who report a (crime) problem to the police are randomly assigned to receive ‘treatment’ (e.g. the possibility of conflict mediation) or not. Are there clear group differences in terms of conflict resolution and public satisfaction with the police? Up to this point, we have established exploratory theoretical and empirical foundations to further pursue such a line of research.

Alford , J. ( 2002 ). ‘Defining the Client in the Public Sector: A Social-Exchange Perspective.’ Public Administration Review 62 ( 3 ): 337 – 346 .

Google Scholar

Alford , J. and Speed , R. ( 2006 ). ‘Client Focus in Regulatory Agencies: Oxymoron or Opportunity?’ Public Management Review 8 ( 2 ): 313 – 331 .

Arlbjørn , J. S. , Freytag , P. V. , and De Haas , H. ( 2011 ). ‘Service Supply Chain Management: A Survey of Lean Application in the Municipal Sector.’ International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management 41 ( 3 ): 277 – 195 .

Beckett , J. ( 2000 ). ‘The ‘Government Should Run Like a Business’ Mantra.’ American Review of Public Administration 30 ( 2 ): 185 – 204 .

Bittner , E. ( 1990 [1970] ). Aspects of Police Work . Boston : Northeastern University Press .

Google Preview

Boulton , L. , McManus , M. , Metcalfe , L. , and Brian , D. ( 2017 ). ‘Calls for Police Service: Understanding the Demand and Profile and the UK Police Response.’ The Police Journal 90 ( 1 ): 70 – 85 .

CBS . ( 2022 ). Veiligheidsmonitor 2021 [Safety Monitor 2021]. The Hague : Statistics Netherlands . www.cbs.nl .

CBS . ( 2023 ). Vertrouwen in instituties [Trust in institutions]. The Hague : Statistics Netherlands . www.cbs.nl .

Clamp , K. and Paterson , C. ( 2017 ). Restorative Policing: Concepts, Theory and Practice . London : Routledge .

Den Hartog , J. and Van Steden , R. ( 2023 ). Herstelgericht maatwerk in Zuid: een onderzoek naar interventies, uitkomsten en leerpunten [Custom-made policing in the Amsterdam South district: a study on interventions, outcomes and learnings] . Internal police report.

Eck , J. and Spelman , W. ( 1987 ). ‘Who Ya Gonna Call? The Police as Problem-Busters.’ Crime & Delinquency 33 ( 1 ): 31 – 52 .

Felser , C. , Nas , J. , and Oosten , J. ( 2017 ). Betekenisvol handelen: politiewerk vanuit de bedoeling [Acting meaningfully: police work with a purpose] . Apeldoorn : Police Academy .

Home Office ( 2023 ). Public Perceptions of Policing: A Review of Research and Literature . London : Home Office . www.gov.uk/government/publications

Johnson , S. , Tilley , N. , and Bowers , K. ( 2015 ). ‘Introducing EMMIE: An Evidence Rating Scale to Encourage Mixed-Method Crime Prevention Synthesis Reviews.’ Journal of Experimental Criminology 11 : 459 – 473 .

Knutsson , J . and Tompson , L . (eds.) ( 2017 ). Advances in Evidence-Based Policing . London : Routledge .

Laufs , J. , Bowers , K. , Birks , D. , and Johnson , S. ( 2021 ). ‘Understanding the Concept of “Demand” in Policing: A Scoping Review and Resulting Implications for Demand Management.’ Policing and Society 31 ( 8 ): 895 – 918 .

Lipsky , M. ( 2010 [1980] ). Streel-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services (30th anniversary expanded edition). New York : Russell Sage Foundation .

Loader , I. ( 1997 ). ‘Policing and the Social: Questions of Symbolic Power.’ British Journal of Sociology 48 ( 1 ): 1 – 18 .

Mannings , M. , Johson , S. , Tilley , N. , Wong , G. , and Vorsina , M. ( 2016 ). Economic Analysis and Efficiency in Policing, Criminal Justice and Crime Reduction: What Works? . Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan .

Moore , M. ( 1995 ). Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government . Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press .

Moore , M. and Braga , A. ( 2003 ). The ‘Bottom Line’ of Policing: What Citizens Should Value (and Measure!) in Police Performance . Washington DC : Police Executive Forum .

Orr , M. and West , D. ( 2007 ). ‘Citizen Evaluations of Local Police: Personal Experience or Symbolic Attitudes?’ Administration & Society 38 ( 6 ): 649 – 668 .

Quingley , M. , Martynowicz , A. , and Gardner , C. ( 2015 ). ‘Building Bridges: An Independent Evaluation of Le Chéile’s Restorative Justice Project – Research Findings.’ Irish Probation Journal 12 : 241 – 257 .

Seddon , J. ( 2017 ). Freedom from Command and Control: A Better Way to Make the Work , 3rd edn. Buckingham : Vanguard Consulting .

Skogan , W. and Hartnett , S. ( 1997 ). Community Policing, Chicago Style . Oxford : Oxford University Press .

Thornton , A. , Sidebottom , A. , Belur , J. , Tompson , L. , and Bowers , K. ( 2019 ). ‘On the Development and Application of EMMIE: Insights from the What Works Centre for Crime Reduction.’ Policing and Society 29 ( 3 ): 266 – 282 .

Walker , N. ( 1996 ). ‘Defining Core Police Tasks: The Neglect of the Symbolic Dimension?’ Policing and Society 6 ( 1 ): 53 – 71 .

Wells , W. ( 2007 ). ‘Type of Contact and Evaluation of Police Officers: The Effects of Procedural Justice Across Three Types of Police-Citizen Contacts.’ Journal of Criminal Justice 35 : 612 – 621 .

Wemmers , J. A. ( 2002 ). ‘Restorative Justice for Victims of Crime: A Victim-Oriented Approach to Restorative Justice.’ International Journal of Victimology 9 : 43 – 59 .

Email alerts

Citing articles via.

  • Recommend to your Library

Affiliations

  • Online ISSN 1752-4520
  • Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
  • About Oxford Academic
  • Publish journals with us
  • University press partners
  • What we publish
  • New features  
  • Open access
  • Institutional account management
  • Rights and permissions
  • Get help with access
  • Accessibility
  • Advertising
  • Media enquiries
  • Oxford University Press
  • Oxford Languages
  • University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

  • Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
  • Cookie settings
  • Cookie policy
  • Privacy policy
  • Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

The community approach to problem solving

  • Sarina Dayal (she/they)
  • June 9, 2021

Three people around a table working on a chart with multi-color post it notes

Participatory grantmaking [i] is no longer new. And it’s here to stay.   

To be clear, participatory grantmaking has never been new. This more just and equitable approach to philanthropy has been practiced for decades and the ethos it is based in—that those closest to the problem are the closest to the solutions—has deep roots  in community organizing, deliberative democracy, and even in philanthropy itself.   

Over the past few years, however, this practice of ceding decision-making power about grants to communities has been  gaining wider traction . Philanthropy has been in a reckoning about its role in systems of inequality, and calls to support advocacy, movement building, and shifting power to include community voices have been steadily inviting more and more funders to reconsider how they work. The COVID-19 pandemic and the movement for racial justice have also held a mirror up to the sector’s practices, while shining a light on the resiliency, strength, and wisdom of those with lived experience.   

But the practice’s recent popularity has not occurred through circumstance alone. For years, a group of practitioners, advocates, and activists have been sharing and writing about the practice. They have created a community, which itself has been a labor of love.   

One of the first projects I was assigned to after joining Candid (then Foundation Center) was the  guide on participatory grantmaking, now a seminal work in the growing body of literature on participatory grantmaking. We collaborated on this work with practitioners across the global participatory grantmaking community. Little did I know then that this work would form lasting bonds, and that years later I’d find myself still sharing space at conferences, on Zoom, in bylines, and most recently in the creation of the  Participatory Grantmaking Community .    

Set up in March 2020, the Participatory Grantmaking Community developed as a place to share resources, challenges, and cheerlead the practice. Over the course of the last year, it has grown from 12 to 300 members with an active Slack group, monthly meetings, and a recently launched website.  

This huge growth in a short time demonstrates the growing interest and appetite for participatory grantmaking and its ethos. It has provided an amazing space to uplift voices in philanthropy that don’t often fall under the spotlight. It also represents a huge amount of work on the part of the participatory grantmakers who have thoughtfully been disseminating their wisdom and resources, and often on voluntary time—and that deserves recognition and celebration.  

Doing participatory grantmaking is not easy, and neither is advocating for it. Despite how the practice is taking off, it can still sometimes be siloed off as a fad or something just for grassroots grantmakers. But it really can be for anyone, and most foundation staff are  ready to explore it .   

In keeping with the participatory ethos, the formation of the community, website, and programming are all created and run collectively. It’s a community that is always asking, “Who are we accountable to?” and “How should we iterate?” It’s a community that’s not afraid to get things wrong, seek feedback, and work without hierarchy. I would like to give a huge kudos to the working group and Hannah Paterson, a grantmaker with the National Lottery Fund and Churchill fellow based in the UK, whose expertise  on participatory grantmaking has really brought the community to form. Especially during the pandemic, when finding meaningful connections has felt more difficult, building and being a part of this very intentional community within philanthropy has felt so rewarding. It’s a wonderful mix of funders—some who have been doing this work for decades, some a few months, and some who are still figuring out where to start.  

Philanthropy is not work we should be doing alone, no matter if it’s formally designated participatory or not. It’s clear that whether in-person or online, practitioners value the wisdom of their peers and seek to establish meaningful connections with one another, and that our collective impact is wider when we share how we work. The Participatory Grantmaking Community is excited to keep growing with a schedule of learning events, a buddy system, and the development and dissemination of resources.   

Candid is also tracking the growth of this practice through data. (A reminder to practitioners out there:  report your data and make sure you mention participatory grantmaking in the grant description so we can keep exploring trends in this area.) Since 2006, more than 11,000 grants totaling $187 million have been made to or through participatory grantmaking worldwide. The vast majority support human rights.  

This wasn’t another blog post telling you what participatory grantmaking is or why it matters. There is plenty of other literature already out there—most recently even a  book ! Instead, this was a blog post to celebrate the growth and successes of a community that is here to stay in philanthropy, and invite you to get involved. Follow the community on Twitter at @PGMComm  and hashtag  #ShiftThePower , and check out the website: participatorygrantmaking.org .  

[i] Participatory grantmaking is commonly defined as the practice of ceding decision-making power about funding—including the strategy and criteria behind those decisions—to the very communities that funders aim to serve. (Cynthia Gibson, Deciding Together ,  GrantCraft , 2018.)  

  • Trends & Issues
  • Researchers
  • International
  • Nonprofit and charity work
  • Trust-based philanthropy

About the author

Sarina Dayal

Sarina Dayal is the research associate at Candid, where she helps derive insights and trends about the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. She is passionate about using data to reimagine philanthropic practice in a way that democratizes power and is truly regenerative for communities and the planet. Sarina holds a B.S. from the University of California, Davis, where she majored in Sustainable Environmental Design and minored in Middle East/South Asia studies.

Leave a comment Cancel reply

Post comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

Barbara Heisler says:

See this article from 2011!

https://www.d5coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/FundingExchangeGrantmakingModel.pdf

Related posts

problem solving approach in community

Black women and gender-expansive nonprofit leaders: Combating the absence of trust 

Learn about the challenges Black women and gender-expansive nonprofit leaders face, including a lack of trust—and the sector-wide implications of these disconcerting dynamics.

By Lauren Brathwaite (she/her)

February 22, 2024

A group of people working together in an office setting.

Beyond efficiency: A human-first AI adoption strategy

Beth Kanter and Allison Fine weigh nonprofit AI tools’ risks and benefits, illustrating why a human-first AI adoption strategy is key to unlocking efficiency sustainably and responsibly.

By Beth Kanter (she/her) and Allison Fine (she/her)

February 21, 2024

Candid community site visit at the Enoch Pratt library.

  • Tips & Training

Candid community: Expanding equitable access to nonprofit resources 

Learn how our growing network of Candid community partners support nonprofits’ success by providing free, local access to our resources, tools, and training.

By Samantha Ryder (she/her)

February 20, 2024

A man on a laptop with a robotic hand writing next to him.

To bot or not to bot: Using generative AI in grantwriting

Learn what generative AI is, ways it can be useful for nonprofit grantwriting, and how to use it responsibly.

By David M. Holmes (he/him) and Kristin Hanlin (she/her)

February 14, 2024

The Eleventh Circuit Court.

Protecting the right to give according to our values

Independent Sector’s Dr. Akilah Watkins and Council on Foundations’ Kathleen Enright share the sector-wide implications of a current lawsuit challenging the Fearless Fund’s right to invest in programs that support Black women entrepreneurs.

By Dr. Akilah Watkins (she/her) and Kathleen P. Enright (she/her)

February 8, 2024

Candid's development team on an outing.

Prioritizing the real people behind demographic data 

Candid’s VP of Influence shares why it’s pivotal to prioritize the people behind the demographic data in grant applications and reporting.

By Aleda Gagarin (she/her)

January 16, 2024

IMAGES

  1. A Collective Approach To Community Problem Solving

    problem solving approach in community

  2. Collaborative Problem Solving

    problem solving approach in community

  3. Insights Into Community Problem Solving

    problem solving approach in community

  4. problem-solving-steps-poster

    problem solving approach in community

  5. The 5 Steps of Problem Solving

    problem solving approach in community

  6. U.S. EPA collaborative problem-solving model.

    problem solving approach in community

VIDEO

  1. Problem Discussion

  2. MO Theory-B (A Problem-Solving Approach)

  3. simple approach in solving variation problems!!!!

  4. Problem Solving Series (Algebra) 06 Mathful Academy

  5. Poor problem Resolution Skills🙃

  6. Problem Solving Series (Algebra) 01 Mathful Academy

COMMENTS

  1. 3.2: Problem Solving Approaches and Interventions

    This page titled 3.2: Problem Solving Approaches and Interventions is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Vera Kennedy. There are six problem solving approaches and interventions most commonly used among practitioners. Each approach examines a different aspect of a social problem.

  2. Section 1. An Introduction to the Problem-Solving Process

    A good definition can be found in Lead on! The complete handbook for group leaders. The authors define problem solving as "an individual or collaborative process composed of two different skills: (1) to analyze a situation accurately, and (2) to make a good decision based on that analysis." ... The Community Tool Box is a service of the Center ...

  3. Section 9. Community Action Guide: Framework for Addressing Community

    Regardless of the complexity of the problem at hand within your community, action planning helps you: Understand the community's perception of both the issue at hand and its potential solutions Assure inclusive and integrated participation across community sectors in the planning process

  4. (PDF) Collaborative Community Problem Solving: A Model and

    Abstract A comprehensive model for supporting community collaboration is proposed. The authors describe a model of community collaboration that consists of four components. First, the model is...

  5. Section 2. Thinking Critically

    Section 2. Thinking Critically Main Section Checklist Tools PowerPoint Learn the process of examining, analyzing, questioning, and challenging situations, issues, and information of all kinds. What is critical thinking? Why is critical thinking important? Who can (and should) learn to think critically?

  6. PDF Applying Problem-Solving Approach in Community Capacity Development

    practice, the problem-solving approach maintains its popularity and dominance in the community development process. Understandably, the problem-solving encounters more scrutiny, discussion, and challenges than any other theory or model (Jones and Silva, 1991). Further, increasing admonishments for alternative paths and strategies in community

  7. Community-Powered Problem Solving

    Inviting your constituencies to collectively help you solve problems and exploit opportunities—"co-creation"—is a better approach. It allows you to continually tap the skills and insights ...

  8. Analyzing Community Problems and Defining Objectives

    This kind of approach can often eliminate issues that people believe are community problems, which really are not, before more time is wasted in their analysis. ... Nagy J, Heaven C (2009) An introduction to the problem solving process. Community Tool Box, Work Group for Community Health and Development, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS ...

  9. Broadening participation in community problem solving: A

    In this article, we seek to overcome some of this fragmentation of effort by presenting a multidisciplinary model that lays out the pathways by which broadly participatory processes lead to more effective community problem solving and to improvements in community health.

  10. Problem-Solving Theory: The Task-Centred Model

    This chapter focuses on the task-centred model (Reid and Epstein 1972) as a prime example of the major influence problem-solving theory has exerted in the practice of social work.First, as background for understanding the development of the task-centred model, the chapter offers a brief account of the historical development of the problem-solving model (Perlman 1957) and describes its key ...

  11. Understanding Community Needs based on Community Perspectives

    The approach is consistent with the principles of Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) whereby community members participate with researches in solving community problems identified by the community - community members themselves are best-equipped to identify and prioritize the issues that are important to them, and to then collaborate ...

  12. 35 problem-solving techniques and methods for solving complex problems

    6. Discovery & Action Dialogue (DAD) One of the best approaches is to create a safe space for a group to share and discover practices and behaviors that can help them find their own solutions. With DAD, you can help a group choose which problems they wish to solve and which approaches they will take to do so.

  13. Effective approaches to community development

    The community development approaches include: needs-based approach, problem-solving approach, participatory approach, asset-based approach, the power-conflict-approach, welfare...

  14. What is Problem Solving? Steps, Process & Techniques

    1. Define the problem Diagnose the situation so that your focus is on the problem, not just its symptoms. Helpful problem-solving techniques include using flowcharts to identify the expected steps of a process and cause-and-effect diagrams to define and analyze root causes. The sections below help explain key problem-solving steps.

  15. 6 Community-Based Proactive Strategies: Implications for Community

    Problem Solving: 17: Problem solving (general) 15: 18: Agency partnerships: 2: 19: ... The research literature on interventions that take a community-based approach concentrates on three main strategies for proactive policing: community-oriented policing, broken windows policing, and procedural justice policing. ...

  16. The Problem-Solving Process

    Problem-solving is a mental process that involves discovering, analyzing, and solving problems. The ultimate goal of problem-solving is to overcome obstacles and find a solution that best resolves the issue. The best strategy for solving a problem depends largely on the unique situation.

  17. PDF Adopting Housing Problem -Solving Approaches with Prevention, Diversion

    homelessness, every community must have in place a systemic response that ensures that homelessness is a rare, brief, and one-time experience. Using a housing problem-solving approach can prevent homelessness and help ... Housing problem-solving approaches support the effective implementation of . homelessness prevention, diversion, and rapid ...

  18. PDF Problem-Solving Tips

    Taking a problem-solving approach to addressing a specific crime problem calls for a broad inquiry into the nature of the particular problem. As part of that inquiry, many police-community problem-solving teams have found it useful to analyze the patterns of repeat calls relating to specific victims, locations, and offenders. Research

  19. 12 Approaches To Problem-Solving for Every Situation

    1. Rational One of the most common problem-solving approaches, the rational approach is a multi-step process that works well for a wide range of problems. Many other problem-solving techniques mirror or build off of its seven steps, so it may be helpful to begin with the rational approach before moving on to other techniques.

  20. Meaningful interventions: Applying a citizen-centric approach to

    Victims of crime may not necessarily wish to punish an offender; they may just want to be heard and have their problem resolved. In response, the Dutch police have introduced a pilot to provide 'meaningful interventions', such as conflict mediation, as a way to bridge institutional and citizen perspectives successfully.

  21. PDF A Problem-Solving Approach

    Community health management: a problem-solving approach 6 Senior health managers and faculty staff have often been sceptical about the methodology as it differs from the traditional, often theoretical, patterns of training typically used in the Region. However, scepticism changes to interest in the light of

  22. PDF A Problem Oriented Approach to Community Policing

    going to another community meeting. Using a problem-solving approach, let's revisit this scenario. You are one of the officers. 1. Build a Relationship. "You can either be right or you can be in a relationship." Wise words from a father to his son before the son's wedding. Relationships require trust and understanding, which results from

  23. Participatory grantmaking: community approach to problem solving

    The community approach to problem solving. Sarina Dayal (she/they) June 9, 2021. Participatory grantmaking [i] is no longer new. And it's here to stay. To be clear, participatory grantmaking has never been new. This more just and equitable approach to philanthropy has been practiced for decades and the ethos it is based in—that those ...

  24. Community-Oriented Policing and Problem-Oriented Policing

    Community-Oriented Policing Definition Specific Types of COP Programs Theoretical Foundation Outcome Evidence Problem-Oriented Policing Definition Overlap of POP With Other Policing Strategies Theoretical Foundation Outcome Evidence Conclusion References About this Literature Review Last Update: January 2023

  25. Readers & Leaders: This is what's missing from your approach to problem

    In this edition of Readers & Leaders, sharpen your business problem-solving skills and learn ways to overcome friction, strengthen teams, and enhance project management efforts. After studying more than 2,000 teams, Robert I. Sutton shares friction-fixing tips to streamline processes for greater efficiency and less frustration.