The term community‑level stigma appears across many areas of research, but it is not always defined in the same way. This project aims to take a broad look at how the concept is used in the existing literature and to identify the different terms or ideas that researchers apply when discussing stigma in a community context. Rather than evaluating how communities produce or respond to stigma, the goal of this review is simply to understand the range of approaches currently present in published work.In reviewing work from fields like public health, sociology, geography, and community psychology, this project will note how researchers use the term, the ideas they pair it with, and the places where definitions differ. Along the way, a range of related concepts is likely to appear, including terms such as social climate, place‑based stigma, territorial stigma, and intersectional stigma.The goal of this review is simply to pull together what is currently being said about community‑level stigma and to identify common patterns in how it is framed, described, and discussed.
