The overall aim of the Applied Psychology Research Center Capabilities & Inclusion – APPsyCI – is to strengthen the capacity of individuals, groups, families, organizations and institutions to develop solutions to concrete societal and complex problems across the life-span, promoting collaborations amongst the public, private and non-profit sectors.
It was structured to:
- (In)form innovative social policies at the national and European levels through effective and evidence-based social community interventions on contemporary societal challenges;
- Provide opportunities to explore internationalization and cross-fertilization of innovation potentials andinteractions among research, intervention and teaching/learning in Psychology and other Social Sciences:
- Articulate and disseminate a diversestock of produced knowledge based on a long-standing experience of Research, Teaching & Intervention;
Topics as Migrations, Homelessness, Mental Health, Children and Youth well-being promotion, deinstitutionalization and integration programs or active aging are amongst the selection topics for research and intervention;
For example:
- People, groups or communities who experience singular or cumulative harmful, life threatening or isolating experiences such as physical and mental health, disabilities, extreme poverty, forced migration, violence and abuse, persistent educational failure, having gender and age as a transversal concern;
- We are committed to the development of concrete solutions to promote well-being in organizations improving the conditions of workplaces, career development across the life-span consistent with dynamics of growth, and sustainability;
- Co-create with several societal sectors with innovative strategies potentiating employability within the contemporary technological challenges, and the changing nature of the labour market;
We also consider pertinent in-depth study of:
- The protective effects of psychological well-being on physical health outcomes, and the effectiveness on Psychotherapy including in-vivo and on-line evaluation tools and platforms;
- Increase multi-sectorial collaboration research and intervention on educational development from early stages to higher education through broad-base ecological and multicultural approaches, civic engagement, information literacy and social development to promote development and interrupt intergenerational poverty cycles;
- Study how applied research on gender studies, including women, LGBT, ethnic minorities, acknowledges social impacts of violence and abuse both in prevention science and effective articulated response, with direct impact on systems change and development;
All these aims and specific purposes are to be operationalized within Open & Citizen Science principles translated into collaborative, transparent dissemination strategies, potentiating the creation transfer of knowledge, made accessible to potentiate the practical uses of scientific outputs to benefit people and social contexts.
The connections and University-Community Partnerships at the national and international levels, ensure the dissemination of the APPsy Research Center production in the academia and the broader societal spheres and publics, ensuring the aim of producing socially relevant and useful science.
The APPsy Research Center is composed of 32 integrated PIs, 17 collaborators and 12 integrated non-doctor, of which 10 are PhD students.
With this Research Center we intend to be actively engaged and emerged in the contemporary societal challenges, contributing for change and development following and potentiating a path that we are already started with:
- Participating has experts in National/ Transnational Reform Strategies
- Integrating Boards and Think Tanks both for science and practice
- Develop national and transnational consortia to submit new proposals within the existing resource lines
Through these contributions we believe that we are able to have strong social impacts in concrete domains such as poverty and extreme unfairness (as Homelessness or Migration), and the promotion of well-being empowerment, capabilities and inclusion.
We are committed to entail continuing dissemination efforts using open principles and technologies science to disseminate research findings to the concrete use for social change and development.