COUV ACTES - Psychologie communautaire

Community Psychology: Common Values, Diverse PracticesMethodParticipantsThe participants were 150 young people with an average age of 22.30 years (range 20- 25 years). 50% of themare living in the Naples and the remaining in its surrounding province. 70% are university students and 30% ofthem are workers, 60% female and the remaining male. We used a type of theoretical sampling, or step by stepresearch based on the concept of grounded theory (Cicognani, 2002).InstrumentsThe instrument used for data collection was the focus group (Krouger,1995), that is one of the techniques of datacollection based on the interaction of the group. The following areas were identified to conduct the focus group:bond with their place; relations with the inhabitants; participation in neighbourhood/village life; planning andfuture. The coding system applied to the texts of the interviews was the Grounded Theory (Strauss & Corbin,2008).ResultsBelonging, influence, fulfilment of needs, and participation in their community were present in a different way inthe city and in its province. In the province a sense of belonging was more evident, including emotional bondingand physical rootedness, identified in literature as the two component of community attachment (Riger, Lavrakas,1981). The bond with their place was also characterized by moods permeated by negative experiences, enclosedin the codes: backward country, the village as a place of passage, the village as a hotel.The lack of relationships with other young neighbors emerged from both city and province people. They didn’t talkabout political and social participation (Mannarini, 2004), while they engaged to sport, religious groups, or tosocialization activities, like going out to pubs and squares to meet people. So this participation wasn’t like a wayto solve problems, but it was a way to run away and relax.With regard to influence, a few young people thought about projects, and the majority of them, in both provinceand city, were influenced by a sense of mistrust.The sense of mistrust was towards institutions that had just a formal role, even though their potential importancewas recognized. This mistrust induced them to have few collective projects that seemed also supported by anindividual motivation and frame. By the date analysis, the core category is: planning; it has been defined by manypeople as a complex topic because they did not have plans yet. The key element that revolved around thepossibility of conducting projects seemed to be the category cultural aspects of the community, which referred toa dimension of collective responsibility. They felt influenced in a negative way by the community, through itscultural aspects and formal role of Institutions. But the opposite wasn’t true. The young people didn’t influence thecommunity, they thought about their own responsibility only when they talked of their need to look for informationin order to achieve some projects, to set up an aggregation place or a firm. Even if most of them were university79