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The Network Analysis for Community Voluntary Organizations and Its Implication for Community Capacity Building Toward Health Promotion

2007; Volume: 17; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.4332/kjhpa.2007.17.4.054

2289-0149

Minsoo Jung, Byong-Hee Cho, Sung-Cheon Lee,

Diverse Approaches in Healthcare and Education Studies

The paradigm of health promotion requests community participation and its active problem-solving. Community is conceptualized as a resource pool to be organized. Such resource is called community capacity. Community participation is a process of capacity building. Community voluntary associations are considered as valuable resource to be used for health promotion. This paper tried to identify the network structure among community voluntary associations and to infer the possibility to make such network of organizations participate in health promotion programs. Two survey data were used for this research: 1) Measurements and Evaluations of Community Capacity on Dobong-gu (N=94) 2) A development plan of health medicine service to be Healthy Gangdong-gu (N=69). The questionnaire included such variables measuring community capacity as leadership, membership, organizational resources, and inter-organizational network, etc. Both regions had the following common characteristics: 1) There were positive correlations between the organization's budget and membership. 2) Organizational types were associated with their founded years. Two regions showed the following differences: Dobong displayed the high density of community organizations, but Gangdong showed the low density. Dobong community organizations were able to be classified into three network clusters such as women & environments, youth & adolescent, and sports organizations. Each cluster of organizations favored the different type of health promotion programs. Gangdong community organizations were less developed, and not possible to be clustered. Depending upon the level of community capacity or community organizations' differentiation, the strategy of community participation could be settle down in different ways. Particularly the health agency had to pay more attention to support the growth of civil organizations.