Community Asset Mapping in Public Health: A Review of Applications and Approaches

ABSTRACT

Though Community Asset Mapping (CAM) has been widely used in community-development and applied to public health interventions, little has been done to synthesize the current state of this approach. This paper reports the findings from a scoping review of research where CAM was applied to public health practice and research initiatives. We identified and reviewed 28 articles featuring studies that used asset mapping for public health purposes. Overall, we found that the purpose and methods related to asset mapping varied widely across studies. Given the potential benefits of asset mapping and its relevance to social work principles, researchers and public health professionals should approach asset mapping with the same level of attention, rigor, and ethics as other research methodologies or intervention design. There is an obligation to engage in asset mapping in ways that promote our ethical principles of service, dignity, integrity, and competence.

KEYWORDS:

• Community asset mapping (CAM)
• public health
• social work
• scoping review

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/19371918.2022.2114568

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant 1951974.