A Critical Review of Instruments Assessing Characteristics of Community

Abstract

Community development is critical in South African and other low- to middle-income contexts characterised by unemployment, violence, poverty and poor infrastructure. The current asset-based trend in community research emphasises constructive community development and change through the mobilisation of existing and unrecognised community resources and skills. Following this trend we critically examine the conceptual soundness and logic of asset-based community assessment instruments. We give particular attention to measures of social capital, social cohesion, community resilience, and sense of community. Our review reveals that while the asset-based approaches embody an important shift away from the deficits orientation, their associated instruments, which bring discursive impositions, are marked by conceptual and operational ambiguities, troubling assumptions about community and uneasy power dynamics in their implementation. We suggest that such challenges may be addressed through the employment of measures that draw on both quantitative and qualitative paradigms, and that assume participatory strategies to implementation.