Critical Hopefulness: A Person‐Centered Analysis of the Intersection of Cognitive and Emotional Empowerment

Abstract

Leaders in struggles for social justice agree on the importance and the difficulty of maintaining hopefulness while developing critical awareness of social issues. Research has indicated that the analogous components of psychological empowerment (emotional and cognitive) often do not co-vary across populations. This study used a person-centered analytic approach, latent class analysis, to identify subpopulations of participants (n = 1,322) according to the cognitive and emotional components of psychological empowerment. Four distinct sub-groups emerged: those who were relatively (1) critical but alienated, (2) uncritical but hopeful, (3) uncritical and alienated, or (4) critical and hopeful. These clusters were then examined for demographic differences and relationships with a set of conceptually relevant variables including social capital, psychological sense of community, openness, organizational participation and mental wellbeing. Results shed light on the complexity of empowerment processes and yield implications for ongoing community research and action.

Influences of Community and Organizational Participation, Social Support, and Sense of Community on Psychological Empowerment: Income as Moderator

“…Perhaps the disempowering effects of consciousness-building through organizational participation were strong enough (see Christens, Collura, & Tahir, 2013) to temper the effects of organizational empowerment for this group, members of which are less likely to benefit from forces of social reproduction within mediating institutions that privilege the experiences of the wealthiest. Perhaps the disempowering effects of consciousness-building through organizational participation were strong enough (see Christens, Collura, & Tahir, 2013) to temper the effects of organizational empowerment for this group, members of which are less likely to benefit from forces of social reproduction within mediating institutions that privilege the experiences of the wealthiest.…”

Nurse's psychological empowerment and perceived autonomy in university and teaching hospitals at Menofia Governorate/Egypt

“…Empowerment within the workplace can result in job satisfaction which is essential given that empowerment and job satisfaction lead to quality patient care outcomes and professional autonomy [14] .…”

Validation of the Brief Sense of Community Scale among youth of color from an underserved urban community

“…Following this, we further examined the entire BSCS and each of the five SOC subscales with theoretically related variables (e.g., PE, relational power, and school importance). We expected to find, based upon previous investigations, that SOC would be positively related to PE (Kenyon & Carter, ; Lardier, ; Peterson & Reid, ; Peterson et al., ; Speer et al., ), relational power (Christens, Collura, & Tahir, ), and school importance (Garcia‐Reid et al., ). The influence of neighborhood SOC in community psychology research and the practical importance it has had in prevention–intervention programming and other empowering youth‐based organizations support the need for further research to address the methodological and theoretical concerns of the BSCS among youth in the United States.…”