On being useful: Problem-questioning approaches to policy analysis

The Australian Community Psychologist Volume 30 No 2 © The Australian Psychological Society Ltd This paper develops arguments from Caplan and Nelson (1973), On being useful: The nature and consequences of psychological research on social problems. The central thesis of their paper was that as psychologists we “must be wary of uncritically accepting the idea that the promotion and dissemination of social science knowledge are intrinsically good, moral, and wise” (Caplan & Nelson, 1973, p. 211). Although their paper has a more traditional psychological focus and regards individuals and context as distinctly separate, it does try and establish the importance of problem definitions. That is, the analysis of where and how problems arise and the ways in which decontextualised versions of psychological knowledge lead to “personblame interpretations of social problems” (Caplan & Nelson, 1973, p. 209). Where community psychology apparently becomes distinct from other fields of psychology is in its greater focus on integrating context as a part of its knowledge and praxis. However, Fryer and Laing (2008, p. 14) comment that, “community psychology is becoming increasingly endangered as a critical alternative to mainstream disciplinary ideology, theory, procedure and practice” mainly due to the dominance of U.S. based community psychology knowledge. This is echoed by Dutta (2018, p. 274) who identifies community psychology as historically having been informed by U.S. strains of clinical psychology and that as a result “the discourse of an expanded notion of ‘helping’ has become part of its professional selfdefinition” and these have had a “close and reciprocal relationship with colonialism and racism justifying, consolidating, and furthering the minoritizing and marginalizing of particular groups” (p. 274). Common to both these assessments is that it is not sufficient for community psychology to simply be well-intentioned about context, but that a careful eye needs to be kept on elements that may reduce, obscure or erase sociopolitical and historical context within community psychology work. One such element is the increasingly dominant paradigm in both policy and practice which focuses principally on “solving ‘problems’” (Bacchi, 2008, p. xvi). Central to this paradigm is to discover “‘what works’...(i.e. ‘evidence-based policy’)” (Bacchi, 2009, p. xvi). The main issue here is that problem-solving assumes problems are ready made, and that problems vanish with responses or solutions (Bacchi, On being useful: Problem-questioning approaches to policy analysis