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Community is widely acknowledged as a fundamental aspect of social work practice, and this formulation distinguishes social work from other professions. Because of this long-standing tradition, social work needs to make a greater investment in producing scientific knowledge to enable community change and to incorporate community context into practice. This type of research faces numerous challenges related to the complexity of community interventions, the lack of well-developed community measures, the difficulty of implementing experimental designs, and the spatial dynamics of communities. However, recent substantive and methodological developments should make it possible to advance research on the community as agent, target, and context for social work practice.
Claudia J. Coulton (2005) studied this question.