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Towards a community psychological perspective on unemployment and mental

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Article  in  American Journal of Community Psychology · September 2003

DOI: 10.1023/A:1025698924304 · Source: PubMed

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American Journal of Community Psychology, Vol. 32, Nos. 1/2, September 2003 (°
C 2003)

Toward A Critical Community Psychological Perspective on

Unemployment and Mental Health Research

David Fryer1,3 and Rose Fagan2

Psychological research has established that unemployment causes widespread psychological

distress and ill health in communities but, arguably, little of this research is truly community
psychological. In this paper we sketch out a critical community psychological perspective and
use it to contribute to understanding of the role of psychosocial aspects of income in the
experience and mental health of employed and unemployed members of low-income families
in a severely deprived community context; to the development of innovative participatory
methodology, and to promote the interests of impoverished unemployed people through the
research process as well as through the research outcome.

KEY WORDS: unemployment; critical community psychology.

By social scientific standards, the grounds for large, carefully matched, samples of people in and
confidence in the claim that unemployment causes out of paid jobs and shown that poor mental health re-
widespread psychological distress, suboptimal mental sults from, rather than predisposes to, unemployment.
health, and mental ill health are compelling. If sceptics Moreover, most sceptics should have been impressed
had doubts about what is meant by “mental health,” by relatively sophisticated statistical metareviews of
they should have been settled by discovering how data from selected high quality studies confirming that
the concept of mental health had been operational- social causation is involved.
ized in a wide range of ways. They should also have If sceptics had doubts about whether the research
taken comfort in finding that a large number of stan- was merely the axe-grinding of leftist academics, they
dardized measures, whose validity and reliability have should have been reassured to discover that the re-
been established, had been adopted or where neces- search had been supported by diverse funding ar-
sary developed. If sceptics had doubts about whether rangements and had been undertaken by researchers
the relationship between poor mental health and un- operating on the basis of a variety of ideological as-
employment reflected cause rather than association, sumptions spanning the political spectrum.
they should have been reassured by reading how, in If sceptics had doubts about whether unem-
addition to repeated studies using cross sectional re- ployment was problematic in other than the north
search designs showing that unemployed people have European (de)industrialized countries characterized
poorer mean mental health than groups of otherwise by powerful protestant work ethics, they should have
similar but employed people, a substantial number been reassured to find that the research findings are
of well-designed, longitudinal, studies have tracked extraordinarily consistent over at least seven decades
not only in the UK but across Europe, Australia, New
Zealand, and the USA.
1 Community Psychology Group, University of Stirling, Scotland, If sceptics had doubts about the hegemony of
Stirling, Scotland. positivist research methods in social research, they
2 University of Warwick, England.
3 To whom correspondence should be addressed at Community Psy- should have been reassured to discover that, in
chology Group, University of Stirling, FK9 4LA Stirling, Scotland; addition to such research methods, researchers using a
e-mail: [email protected]. variety of qualitative and postmodern discourse

89 0091-0562/03/0900-0089/0 °
C 2003 Plenum Publishing Corporation
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90 Fryer and Fagan

analytic methods had come to very much the same understanding of, and intervention to prevent or re-
conclusions (Claussen and Bertran, 1999; Feather, duce, socially caused mental health and community
1992; Fryer 1999a; Jahoda, 1982; Murphy and problems defined from the perspective of people af-
Athanasou, 1999; Winefield, Tiggemann & Winefield, fected by those problems in the contexts within which
1993; Warr, 1987). the problems occur. Community psychologists as-
This massive research effort has been carried sume that many aspects of mental and physical health
largely out in communities (in schools, workplaces, are strongly shaped by powerful multilevel forces
and housing schemes) rather than simulated in psy- from the psychobiological via individual, family, peer,
chological laboratories and it has certainly addressed organizational and neighborhood to institutional, so-
issues important to many people in many communi- ciostructural and multinational levels. They assume
ties but is it community psychological in a more in- that those multilevel forces impinge on human agency
teresting and radical sense? We believe that it is not largely through subjective experience, that poor men-
and that, on the contrary, much unemployment and tal health often follows from lack of or reduction in
mental health research (e.g. Proudfoot, Gray, Carson, power (disempowerment) and inadequate social sup-
Guest, & Dunn, 1999), including some research which port and that many services for those experiencing
has been published as exemplary within the commu- mental health problems actually maintain disempow-
nity psychological literature (e.g. Caplan, Vinocur, & erment. Community psychologists aim to work in a
Price, 1997) is actually inconsistent with community collaborative way with people to shift the balance of
psychological assumptions and values (Fryer, 1999b). power in their direction believing that disadvantaged
people frequently have the expertise and insight rele-
vant to prevention or reduction of mental health prob-
THE COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGICAL lems in their own communities.
PERSPECTIVE The repeated demonstration that unemployment
is intimately involved in the social causation of
Community psychologists’ work takes different problems of mental health and psychological well-
forms in different sociohistorical niches. In New being and thus that mental and physical health are
Zealand and Australia, many community psycholo- strongly shaped by powerful sociostructural and in-
gists have focused on “cultural safety” and the way stitutional (in this case, labor market, economic and
power and well-being are structured by gender. In social) forces is clearly consistent with the community
South Africa community psychology has developed psychological project.
tackling post apartheid fallout. In the United States However, orthodox unemployment and mental
community psychologists have tended to focus on health research has overwhelmingly involved the pas-
community mental health, though there is also a sive processing of decontextualized individuals in
strong developmental current within the field. In con- large cohorts through prestructured, closed-choice,
tinental Europe community psychology has tended to scales, and questionnaires. This clearly violates the
develop with organizational and social orientations community psychological principle of working collab-
and in the UK community psychology is informed oratively with people to jointly achieve understanding
by awareness of the limitations of the clinical ap- of a phenomenon in the context within which the phe-
proach to tackle the scale of mental health problems nomenon occurs. The subjective experience of both
generated by dysfunctional social and labor market research participants and researchers, which com-
arrangements. munity psychologists regard as not only inescapable
For elaborations of these claims see Arn, Stieger, but a positive resource for research, tends to be at
Lobnig, Guschelbauer, and Fryer (1998); Dalton, best marginalized and at worst regarded as a source
Elias and Wandersman (2001) for the USA, Orford of error and confusion by orthodox unemployment
(1992) for the UK, Seedat (2001) for South Africa, researchers.
and Thomas and Veno (1996) for Australia and New Community psychology should also be commit-
Zealand. ted to intervening to prevent or reduce psychologi-
However, community psychology worldwide is cal problems through utilizing the expertise and in-
widely characterized as sharing a common set of sight of unemployed people (Fryer, 2000). However
assumptions and values. In a nutshell, commu- the orthodox research literature has tended to fo-
nity psychology is about understanding and help- cus very much on the diminishment by unemploy-
ing. It is a problem driven approach concerned with ment of people’s scope and humanity and on personal
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Unemployment and Critical Community Psychology 91

and collective needs, deficits and incompetence rather that in themselves reduce distress and ill-health, max-
than on personal and collective resources, strengths imise the relationship between researcher and par-
and competencies. Where there has been a effort to ticipant as a source of “data enrichment”; maximize
reduce or prevent distress it tends to have been based the extent of participant control of the research pro-
on the premise that the way to reduce or prevent cess, include participants’ interests in the research
the psychological costs of unemployment is to reduce outcomes as part of the research design, maximize
or prevent unemployment and the way to do this is researcher commitment to the political process of
to bring about intrapsychic change in the individuals change and repositions researchers as answerers of
who are or might be unemployed (Fryer, 1998, 1999b). participants’ questions (Fryer, 1998).
Community psychologists aspire to do problem-
driven research in order to understand and combat
processes of disempowerment and inadequate or ab- THE PROBLEM
sent social support. Realizing not only that unemploy-
ment takes away power and social support but also Unemployed people have repeatedly made clear
that many services for unemployed people actually that the main problems of unemployment are finan-
maintain disempowerment, community psychologists cial (Fryer, 1990). However, the orthodox unemploy-
seek to shift the balance of power in the direction ment research literature has tended to pay lip service
of unemployed people and to promote socially sup- to the role of income-related factors in the experience
portive relationships. However, much unemployment of unemployment. In doing so it has minimized it. In
research has actually been method- (for example the part this was due to dominant theoretical perspec-
longitudinal survey work using the General Health tives like Jahoda’s that emphasized the importance of
Questionnaire popular in the 1980s; Warr, 1987) or the deprivation of latent as opposed to manifest func-
theory-driven (for example the research inspired by tions of employment for unemployed people. In part,
Jahoda’s Manifest and Latent Deprivation theory; it was because the self-report methods popular with
Jahoda, 1982) rather than problem-driven. Moreover, orthodox researchers were insensitive (in every sense
where research has been problem-driven, the behav- of the word) to the complex and stigmatizing factors
ior and attitudes of unemployed people have often involved in the experience of unemployed poverty.
been uncritically defined as problematic by or on be- This research sought to contribute to understand-
half of, powerful stake-holding groups. Unemployed ing of the role of psychosocial aspects of income in
people themselves have seldom been involved in the the experience and mental health of employed and
definition of problem from their perspective. Indeed, unemployed members of low-income families in com-
the work of some psychologists has been arguably part munity context; contribute to the development of in-
of the problem rather than part of the solution. More- novative participatory methodology promote the in-
over, much orthodox unemployment research with its terests of impoverished unemployed people through
bureaucratized passive processing, asymmetric rela- the research process as well as through the research
tionships between researchers and unemployed peo- outcome.
ple and intrusive questioning is in itself disempow-
ering, unsupportive and in many respects similar to
the processing of unemployed people by the State for THE CONTEXT OF THE WORK
income purposes.
Orthodox unemployment research has tended to This research was carried out in a community
use research methods that merely document psycho- experiencing acute and chronic multiple depriva-
logical distress and ill-health, minimize the relation- tion. It took place within three electoral wards of a
ship between researcher and participant as a source medium and high-density housing scheme in a gener-
of data pollution, minimize the extent of participant ally affluent British city. About 55,000 people lived
control of the research process, exclude participants’ in this scheme that was built mostly in the 1950s.
interests in research outcomes as a legitimate part Housing in the area is mostly local authority owned.
of the research design, minimize researchers’ com- The residents were predominantly (98+%) white.
mitment to the political process of change, and posi- Many of the houses were in poor physical condition,
tion research participants as answerers of researchers’ the environment degraded and facilities largely ab-
questions. However, as community psychologists, we sent. Widespread housing problems at the time of
decided to try to develop and use research methods the research included inadequate thermal insulation;
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92 Fryer and Fagan

dampness; lack of play space; poor or nonexistent make it in participants’ interests to disclose fully and
shopping and banking facilities; neighbor disputes; accurately.
rapid turnover of tenants; unrented houses, and refuse
dumping.
Historically, the study area had significantly PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION
higher rates of stillbirths, infant deaths, births to non-
married couples, and births in larger families than the The fieldworker became involved with families
city as a whole. Although the city as a whole had a de- in baby-sitting; child-minding; helping in preschool
clining population, the research area population had child care; helping with household chores such as get-
declined by 10 times as much during a period imme- ting clothes from the line and giving lifts; helping fill
diately before the research took place. Drug abuse in forms, helping write vitae, letters, etc. Field notes
was a major problem in the community at the time were made, with the agreement of participants, to
of the research. Injection of prescribed drugs was keep track of emerging insights.
widespread and heroin-use was growing. Along with
drug-use went related problems of HIV and AIDS via
ACTION RESEARCH
needle sharing.
One child in three in the area was living at or
Detailed information regarding the financial cir-
below income support levels and this proportion had
cumstances of the families were collected through the
doubled since 1981. More than 60% of the residents
use of a regularly updated menu-driven interactive
in the research area were in receipt of housing benefit
program, which allows the operator, by keying in the
and between 63 and 77% of the tenants in the three
personal circumstances of a person to work out all
wards of the research area were in rent arrears. Car
the state maintenance to which that person is enti-
ownership and owner occupation of houses were low.
tled. The welfare benefit advice was delivered through
Free school meal uptake was high.
software loaded onto a portable notebook computer.
At the time of the research, unemployment in
By agreement with research participants, this infor-
the fieldwork area as a whole was 13.2%, compared
mation was made available to the researchers.
to 7% in the city as a whole. Male unemployment was
running at 19.8 and 16.7%, respectively in two of the
three wards. Over 38% of all unemployed people had NONDIRECTIVE QUALITATIVE DEPTH
been out of work for over a year and 22% had been INTERVIEWING
unemployed for over 2 years.
The action research not only provided infor-
mation, which potentially facilitated participants in
METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES increasing their income, but also provided an interac-
tion within which detailed qualitative disclosure re-
In addition to the methodological requirements garding income and the experience of unemployed
arising from working within a community psycholog- poverty could take place. We used depth interview-
ical perspective, given the community context, the ing to explore this. Qualitative analysis was done by
people with whom the work was to be done and the na- a version of cognitive mapping, in which a series
ture of the problems they were facing, methods had to of mind maps in two-dimensional space were used
be sensitive in two domains. First they had to be to chart and refine emerging themes and conceptual
sensitive to precisely investigate the phenomena in interdependencies.
adequate detail. Second, they had to be sensitive
to the needs of participants who were already at
risk of depression, anxiety, humiliation, stigma, lack RESEARCH PARTICIPANTS
of support, low self-confidence, invasion of privacy
and passive processing. This, in our view, methods The research focus was on 30 households. Thir-
needed to facilitate respect, trust, and empathy; be teen of these were single-person households. In the
nonthreatening, non-invasive, and transparent in others we worked with two, three, or four members of
purpose; be individually relevant; facilitate partici- each family, working intensively with 55 participants
pants’ active involvement; empower participants in in all with, where possible, multiple interviews with
process and outcome; address subjectivity in context; differing family members.
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Unemployment and Critical Community Psychology 93

Thirty-six participants had no occupation at the Much authentic material was disclosed relating
time of their research involvement and 19 had oc- to the social exclusion fuelled by difficulty fulfilling
cupations at that time. Those “without employment” not only functional and essential, but also symbolic,
included a majority of unemployed people but also consumption needs; the psychological functionality
disabled, retired, and people in education or training. of so-called “irrational” spending and consumption
Those “with occupations” included part-time and full- patterns; perceived entitlements and disentitlements;
time employees. income-source-related stigma; negative experience of
More than 40 other community members (offi- State agencies and claiming; expenditure planning
cials, activists, etc.) also contributed substantial in- and prioritization of different family members’ needs;
formation to the research and there was also minor domestic division of financial coping behavior; use
research involvement from many more people and of reciprocal support; coping strategies; the prosocial
other relevant aspects of the community context were and mental health promoting nature of participation
also monitored through observation and document in informal (black) economic activity.
analysis. The literature (based largely on studies of men)
has traditionally emphasized the negative conse-
quences of the way unemployment deprives the un-
BEFORE THE BEGINNING employed person of an employment-imposed time
structure. However this research shows that women’s
Before attempting to gain access for fieldwork, experience of time in unemployed families can be
we familiarized ourselves with the fieldwork area by quite different: reference was indeed made to the
participant observation and document analysis. We time structure previously, but no longer, imposed by
then attempted, for several months, to establish and a partner’s employment routine (getting up, meal
build acceptance of, and trust in, the fieldworker times, work-related social events, separation of week-
through a variety of participatory activities in the com- day from weekend, etc.), but much time was spent
munity. These included backstage work with a com- detailing the way time had become structured by a
munity drama group; participation in an arts orga- partner’s nonemployment routine of long lie-ins, in-
nization; helping with gala day and a photography trusive hanging around the house, socializing at home
exhibition; participation in a women’s group and a with other men drinking carry-outs while watching
local activists’ group (assisting with funding applica- videos. The ways other social institutions had increas-
tions, etc.). ingly come to structure time: nursery school hours,
In the later stages of this period, the field- school hours, benefit delivery routines of signing, re-
worker began to identify, make contact with and ceiving post office cheques from the State, cashing
negotiate with gatekeepers (health visitors and mem- them, paying bills, and shopping were also disclosed.
bers of local organizations) to gain access to spe- Seasonal factors to do with weather, regular festive
cific participants within the community. She also occasions like Christmas, Hogmanay, holidays, and
took opportunities to describe and promote the birthdays, which normally involve heavy expenditure
project by speaking at meetings with local community and medium, longer-term and very long-term plan-
organizations. ning also heavily structured time.
There was also unexpected (and counterintu-
itive) detailed talk about working on the side in the
EMERGING THEMES “black” economy. Working on the side is seldom ex-
plored by social scientists in any detail for the ob-
It is very difficult to do justice to complex qualita- vious reasons that such work is usually kept secret
tive material in a brief paper. In any case we are, in this not only because it is illegal but because dominant
paper, more concerned with promoting critical discus- discourses position it as antisocial and immoral. The
sion of method and ideology than contributing sub- action research approach adopted here, involving wel-
stantive “findings” to the unemployment literature. fare benefit advice, helped build trust and facilitated
Accordingly, after a brief summary, we give an indi- detailed investigation of all forms of income leading to
cation of the insights to which this approach can lead the uncovering of a very different perspective. Work
into undeclared, untaxed, and uninsured paid work on the side while claiming unemployment benefit was
in the informal economy and its relations to mental admitted to have financial benefits but relatively lit-
health. tle was made of these financial benefits, other than
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94 Fryer and Fagan

when these were earmarked for particular expensive receipt of money in exchange for hard physical graft
but necessary items like new shoes and children’s reinforced sense of masculinity. Controversially, pro-
clothing. moting black economic activity in unemployed com-
On the other hand, there was explicit disclosure munities may be a way to promote mental health and
about the pride obtained through doing good jobs in- prosocial behavior.
expensively with self-taught skills; the collateral ben- Triangular confirmation was forthcoming and
efits of finding time to sit and chat with people; will- equally interesting in quite other ways on other issues.
ingness to accept payment in kind if people did not For example, mother, daughter, and father sometimes
have money, e.g. a piece of unwanted furniture in re- all disclosed fascinating, if appalling, material in rela-
turn for a tidied garden. There was talk of being lo- tion to their mental health. The mother in one family
cally well regarded for the quality of (black) work spoke of constant exhaustion and feeling under the
and even mention of being respected by local police weather, increasing tendency to slur words, decreas-
officers for the community dimensions of inexpen- ing ability to “think straight”, poor concentration, de-
sive work done for poor and elderly people in the teriorating memory, irritability (especially with her
community. There was evidence of the acquisition of children), boredom, demoralization, social isolation,
sophisticated understanding of the local (black) la- invasion of privacy, and a disturbing sense of the pas-
bor market. Black economic activity was described in sage of time. The father on the other hand spoke
terms of what amounted to self-employment market about constant alertness, as an unemployed person,
testing: testing out supply and demand for different to threat, humiliation, monotony; hatred and anger
skills in differing areas, lowering prices, and increas- toward those responsible and pessimism that things
ing services to drive competitors out of business, etc. would ever get better. The daughter meanwhile spoke
It is not always remembered that for every employee of isolation, exclusion, and humiliation as a conse-
working in the black economy there is an employer. quence of unemployed poverty, talking in detail about
We learned of the practice of employers sacking em- the frequent “slagging” (“being called names and
ployees and simultaneously offering casual uninsured that”) she endured for cheap and nontrendy trainers,
work on the side. In this collusion, the worker on the for her school clothing, for coming from a large fam-
side increases income through receiving both pay and ily and for taking advantage of concessionary rates on
unemployment benefit and the employer on the side school outings. Useful though measures like the GHQ
decreases labor costs. In addition to poor working are in big studies, where group means can be com-
conditions, insecurity, lack of trade union protection pared, they are exceedingly blunt instruments com-
and risk of uncompensated injury, the worker on the pared to the detailed dissection of the issues by par-
side risks financial penalties, or worse, if discovered ticipants themselves within the sort of collaborative
working while claiming by the State. There was ex- action research relationship developed here.
plicit discussion of the extent of “grassing” (neighbors
and other people in the community informing the au-
thorities about illegal behavior) in the “dog eat dog” Practical Financial Outcomes
community: indeed fear of informers in the neighbor-
hood and the consequent risk of prosecution seemed Numbers are misleading with such a small and
the main brake on black economic activities. It was nonrepresentative sample, but one in five families in
the detailed focus on symbolic aspects of unemployed our sample heard of and claimed income to which
and black employed income, which was the most strik- they did not previously know they were entitled. Most
ing aspect, however. The receipt of “dole money” families in our sample did not learn of new entitle-
is described as redolent with indecency, humiliation, ments but many reported that they were relieved to
stigma, and depression. The passivity and lack of any come to understand why they were (and were not)
reciprocity, of an exchange relationship, with unem- entitled to certain benefits. The benefit system was
ployment benefit was especially thoroughly explored. widely regarded as arbitrary and unfair. Having un-
By contrast, money earned from work on the side was certainties removed and the feeling of being arbitrar-
experienced quite differently: there was a reciprocal ily short-changed reduced was reported as beneficial
relationship between the hard work done, the pay- even without any actual increase in income.
ment received, and the entitlement to spend it as one Some family members in our sample used the
pleased. Black economic earnings, unlike dole money, research intervention to calculate the implications of
felt legitimately to be one’s own. Moreover, for me, potential courses of action. Some participants worked
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Unemployment and Critical Community Psychology 95

out in advance the financial costs and benefits of tak- which also exemplified many aspects of what would
ing low-paid employment: adding to the potential today be called a community psychological participa-
wage the benefits they might accrue in, for exam- tory action research approach.
ple, income supplements, government rent payments, To approach Marienthal in conceptual sophisti-
housing tax discounts, hospital fares, free milk, free cation, empirical richness and practical usefulness, we
vitamins for children under 5 years, free spectacles, believe that research on unemployment will have to:
prescriptions, and dental treatment. carry out naturalistic rather than contrived research;
be problem-driven rather than method-, theory-, or
literature-driven; strive for atheoretical, substantive,
CONCLUDING REMARKS social book keeping rather than hypothesis testing,
generalisable theory building; engage in collabora-
In this paper we have attempted to address tive problem definition rather than expert domi-
three main readerships: unemployment and men- nated formulation; adopt heterarchical participatory
tal health researchers, community psychologists, and working practices rather than hierarchical bureau-
methodologists. cratic ones; form alliances that transcend disciplinary
We have invited fellow unemployment and men- and professional boundaries rather than drawing ex-
tal health researchers to ask themselves whether, for cluding professional demarcation lines; cultivate and
all the massive research effort over many continents utilize the potential of collective political and ide-
and decades, the understanding we have collectively ological commitment rather than aspire to politi-
constructed is fundamentally myopic, inauthentic, cal and ideological neutrality; investigate and act at
paradigm/theory driven, and usually irrelevant to the multiple levels and perspectives rather than within
lives of most unemployed people or complicit in their a monolevel and unilateral perspective; value par-
problems. We have tried to show ways of reconcep- ticipatory change over voyeuristic research; inter-
tualizing the issues not as exemplars or prescriptions vene and/or prevent socially rather than treat in-
but as an illustration of what is possible. dividually. For more on the Marienthal research
We have invited fellow community psychologists as early community psychological work, please see
to ask themselves whether (at least some of) our con- Fryer (2001).
servative practice matches up to (at least some of) our In this modest but time consuming project we
radical rhetoric? We have tried to show how we have have not only attempted to investigate contemporary
attempted to radicalize our work in process and out- unemployed poverty but we have also attempted, if in
come. Again this is not meant as an exemplar or in a only a small way, to live up to the inspiring example
prescriptive way but as an illustration of one way of of critical community psychology which Marie Jahoda
“doing” unemployment and mental health research and colleagues demonstrated possible in Austria in
“more community psychologically.” the 1930s.
We have recommended fellow methodologists to This has meant going beyond demonstrating
constantly rethink what counts as research, under- that our social arrangements are in many respects
standing, knowledge and practice from a variety of pathogenic. It has meant departing from the prac-
stakeholder perspectives and, for community psychol- tices of most institutionally based social science, which
ogists at least, to come down methodologically on the is generally irrelevant to real problems and where
side of the most disempowered and voiceless, in this relevant often blames the victim. It has meant tak-
case unemployed people, in problem definition, prob- ing to heart the insight that social scientists do not
lem exploration and problem solution. have all the expertise and that victims of oppressive
Is this approach to community psychology a new, social arrangements have great insight and strength
radical, utopian, and impractical approach? We do not too. It has meant accepting that social science with-
think so. Although many US commentators assume out attention to subjectivity or attention to subjec-
that the beginnings of community psychology can be tive experience without simultaneous attention to so-
traced back to the USA of the 1960s (e.g. Bennett cioeconomic structural context are “academic” in the
et al., 1966; Meritt et al., 1999), we suggest that the pejorative sense of the word. It has meant accepting
research described here resonates with a classic multi- that “value free” social science a self-deluding mi-
faceted project in Europe in the 1930s in the Austrian rage, which colludes with the oppressive status quo,
village of Marienthal (Jahoda-Lazarsfeld, & Zeisel, and that social science devoid of concern with social
1933; Jahoda, Lazarsfeld, and Zeisel, 1972), a project justice is morally bankrupt.
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96 Fryer and Fagan

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Fryer, D. (1999b). For better and for worse: Interventions

and mental health consequences of unemployment. Interna-
tional Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health,
The support of ESRC grant no. ROOO 231798 72(Suppl.), 34–37.
during some of the preparatory work for this paper is Fryer, D. (2000). The future of primary prevention. The Journal of
acknowledged with gratitude. Primary Prevention, 21(2), 137–140.
Fryer, D. (2001). Back to the future. In J. Zempel, J. Bacher, &
K. Moser, (Hrsg.), Erwerbslosigkeit. Ursachen, Auswirkungen
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(1998). European network of community psychology. Journal sity Press.
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