Abstract

Current trends in the field of social psychology reflect diversity in its themes and methods for research. Community can become an important topic for psychological research. The present paper examines the needs for community research from social psychological perspective and characterizes social psychological research of community. It reviews major research fields to show how each field may contribute to community research by social psychologists. To compensate for the shortcomings of traditional methods in social psychology for community research, the social representational approach(Moscovici, 1984) can be usefully employed and, thus, discussed in greater details.