A thesis submitted in lulfillment of the requirements for the degree of PHD Community Psychologv in the Department of Psychology University of Zululand, 2001. / There is strong evidence showing the adverse effects of unemployment on social and psychological functioning as well as on physical health. With the present depressed economy, individuals will continue to be vulnerable to the harmful effects of retrenchment and unemployment. Such factors contribute to crime in our country. The South African community psychology movement is an attempt to take psychology to the people and empower communities, particularly historically and economically disadvantaged communities, through improved networking, education, health, social welfare and development projects which optimize local resources, resolve problems of the apartheid years and improve relationships within and between communities. A qualitative participatory action research approach to empowerment was utilized in this thesis. Mutual aid groups proved to be a successful empowering methodology to unemployed people in their own communities and their contexts. The contention of the present study is that qualitative research, with its value emphasis on capturing the diversity of respondents" experiences, its attention to the context of researched phenomena and its capacity to document the voices of historically marginalized communities, greatly facilitated the realization of these core values in our work with communities. The main finding in this study is that research and practice both benefit from a narrative approach that links process to practice and attends to the voices of the people of interest. Narrative theory an^ methods tend to open the field to a more inclusive attitude as to the data and to cross disciplinary insights as well as community collaboration. From the present study it becomes clear that culture tends to prescribe certain ways of acting which can be referred to as prescribed stories. The narrative approach used here does not claim that culturally prescribed stories are either good or bad, nor does it take a moral or evaluative position on the dominant narratives in communities Mutual aid group methods are found to be appropriate for those conducting action research and those concerned to "empower' research participants because the participants become an active part of the process of analysis. Group participants may actually develop particular perspectives as a consequence of talking with other people who have similar experiences. / The National Research Foundation