The Sociocultural Context of Psychosocial Interventions

Across diverse academic fields, scholars and practitioners are engaged in developing interventions to promote outcomes like health and quality of life. Indeed, such is the apparent efficacy of such interventions, that there are many policy-led initiatives to implement these at a national and international scale. However, few scholars or practitioners have thought in any systematic and critical way about the importance of contextualizing these interventions, i.e., considering how the impact of such interventions may be affected and mediated by specific sociocultural factors (from gender to ethnicity to socio-economics).

The aim of this Research Topic is to address this lacuna. As such, we will help to bring a more ‘contextual’ mindset to the implementation of health and wellbeing interventions. This may help to shift the way such interventions are designed and implemented, both at a granular local level (i.e., influencing individual practitioners) and at a large-scale macro level (e.g., influencing policy makers).

Themes within this Research Topic concern the impact of social and cultural changes on mental health and wellbeing in different populations (or the general population), as well as on professional practice (i.e. how sociocultural contexts and changes related to gender, ethnicity, ideology etc. influence the practice of psychology as well as the expectations and actions of psychological services users). We think that this is an important topic, with a very high impact on practice that has not received sufficient attention.