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Community interventions are complex social processes that need to move beyond single interventions and outcomes at individual levels of short-term change. A scientific paradigm is emerging that supports collaborative, multilevel, culturally situated community interventions aimed at creating sustainable community-level impact. This paradigm is rooted in a deep history of ecological and collaborative thinking across public health, psychology, anthropology, and other fields of social science. The new paradigm makes a number of primary assertions that affect conceptualization of health issues, intervention design, and intervention evaluation. To elaborate the paradigm and advance the science of community intervention, we offer suggestions for promoting a scientific agenda, developing collaborations among professionals and communities, and examining the culture of science.

Community psychology has historically focused on understanding individual behavior in sociocultural context, assessing high-impact contexts, and working in and with communities to improve their resources and influence over their futures. This review adopts an ecological perspective on recent developments in the field, beginning with philosophy of science and progressing through a series of substantive research and intervention domains that characterize current work. These domains include research on the ecology of lives, the assessment of social settings and their impact on behavior, culture and diversity as expressed in the community research process, and community intervention.

Beginning with a social system perspective on the forms and functions of the junior high school and high school classroom, a Classroom Environment Scale (CES) was developed. The CES is a 90-item perceived environment scale that assesses nine dimensions (e.g., student involvement, competition) of the classroom. Intercorrelations among the subscales indicate that the CES measures distinct, though moderately correlated, aspects of the classroom environment. Each of the subscales significantly discriminates among the 38 classrooms in the current standardization sample, and internal consistency of the subscales and overall profile stability are high. Sample profiles of contrasting classrooms are described and compared, and the theoretical implications as well as the pragmatic utility of the CES are discussed.The conceptualization and assessment of human environments has recently assumed increased importance as an area of theoreti-

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