新作坊

Tailoring Organizational Characteristics for Empowerment: Accommodating Individual Economic Resources

摘要：

Empowerment is an important value orientation & intervention approach in social work & other disciplines. Viewed from an ecological perspective, a good fit between organizational characteristics & the life circumstances of individuals should provide empowerment benefits. By studying interaction effects of material resources & organizational characteristics on empowerment, this research sought to extend understanding of empowerment dynamics in community organizations. Using hierarchical regression analyses to investigate socioeconomic status (SES) in a moderator model, findings of the study demonstrated that, among a diverse group of participants in two different faith-based community organizations, perceptions of organizational characteristics were more strongly related to empowerment for participants of lower SES. A substantive implication of the study is that community practitioners should attend to the fit between specific organizational processes & economic circumstances of community-based organization participants. Strategies weighted toward attention to relationships among members linked to availability of & participation in a variety of organizational roles may be more salient for empowerment of the disadvantaged. Our findings are consistent with an ecological orientation to empowerment, & they add further support to the importance of ecological specificity in empowerment theory. 2 Tables, 60 References. Adapted from the source document. COPIES ARE AVAILABLE FROM: HAWORTH DOCUMENT DELIVERY CENTER, The Haworth Press, Inc., 10 Alice Street, Binghamton, NY 13904-1580