The dog days of COVID – July in Community Psychology

by Jon Scaccia August 3, 2021

The dog days of summer can be a blessing to many who straddle the academic world. Here — finally — is the spaciousness to read, write, unwind, upwind, do all the things that we wanted to do if only we had the time!

If only.

It’s not just the volume of articles coming out. COVID-related news, including the emergence of delta, have commandeered our attention. We’ve written a lot about vaccine hesitancy over the past month. As people may or may not be getting ready to return to the office or campus, we want to think about how to manage the values of others. These posts provide some guidance and resources to tailor messaging to the concerns that different groups of people might have.

So, for those who do get to spend time on the beach, or at the cabin, or quietly on a couch, here’s a synthesis of the last month of articles published in community psychology journals. This month, we’ve added Community Psychology in Global Perspective to the mix, giving us a grand total of five journals yielding 77 articles.

Topic and Trends

Since there were somewhat fewer results this month, we had fewer clusters of articles. The graph below shows the six clusters of articles, along with the number of articles in each group.

We also looked at relationships between the topics above. The below network plot shows the correlations between the topics, with the strongest relationships being between the participatory and homelessness topics. These correlations aren’t that high (r ≥ 0.15), yet still interesting.

Descriptive Visuals

Below shows some high-level word counts, displayed as both a word cloud and a network plot. And yes, COVID is still a prominent theme.

Representative Articles

After we clustered the articles, we identified the article that is most representative of each cluster. Here’s a downloadable table with these articles specified. If you only can focus on six articles this month, this will cover you. We specifically want to call out this great new article from Nina Wallerstein on CBPR and equity.

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