Exploring Participant‐Generated Examples of Social Change: A Two‐Stage, Mixed Methods, Delphi Study

Thompson, M, Rosser, B ORCID: 0000-0002-1492-2706, Stone, E, Parker, H and Harrison-Wolff, E (2025) Exploring Participant‐Generated Examples of Social Change: A Two‐Stage, Mixed Methods, Delphi Study. Journal of Community Psychology, 53 (5). ISSN 0090-4392

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Abstract

Many of the critical challenges facing our world, especially concerning the climate and ecological emergencies, require social change. Community psychology has a longstanding relationship with social change, but our focus on it, frameworks around it, and ability to bring it about varies. This two-stage, mixed methods, Delphi study explores participant generated examples of and responses to social change to help refocus our praxis at this time. The study gathered both participant generated examples of social change (stage 1, n=190) and ratings of them (stage 2, n=232) in terms of significance and valence. A thematic analysis of the 52 examples from stage 1 produced four themes: i. Legal protections, rights, and equality; ii. Technological impacts; iii. Global and domestic political events and governance; and iv. Societal beliefs and behaviour. In stage 2, all 52 examples were viewed by participants as being significant. While most were viewed as positive, eight were neutral and six, negative. Meaningful differences were found between average scores across themes in terms of significance and valence. The discussion highlights the broad range of social changes, and their significance and valence variations. It then explores how these findings might build the potential contribution of community psychology in the arena of progressive social change against a global backdrop that needs such changes more than ever.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Thompson, M., Rosser, B., Stone, E., Parker, H. and Harrison-Wolff, E. (2025), Exploring Participant-Generated Examples of Social Change: A Two-Stage, Mixed Methods, Delphi Study. Journal of Community Psychology, 53: e70024. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcop.70024, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1002/jcop.70024. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions. This article may not be enhanced, enriched or otherwise transformed into a derivative work, without express permission from Wiley or by statutory rights under applicable legislation. Copyright notices must not be removed, obscured or modified. The article must be linked to Wiley’s version of record on Wiley Online Library and any embedding, framing or otherwise making available the article or pages thereof by third parties from platforms, services and websites other than Wiley Online Library must be prohibited.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	1701 Psychology; Developmental & Child Psychology; 4206 Public health; 5201 Applied and developmental psychology; 5205 Social and personality psychology
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Divisions:	Psychology (from Sep 2019)
Publisher:	Wiley
Date of acceptance:	6 May 2025
Date Deposited:	10 Jul 2025 12:54
Last Modified:	10 Jul 2025 13:00
DOI or ID number:	10.1002/jcop.70024
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/26756

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