Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

This thesis addresses the underexplored area of facilitation within public participation processes, particularly focusing on the strategic communication of the planners working as facilitators. Through inductive analysis with the help of grounded theory, this study developed a content analysis approach. It employs a set of analytical categories —functional element, turn, and episode —to track and make sense of both verbal and non-verbal actions of facilitators from a functional perspective. The research conducted a case study, reviewing the facilitation practice in public consultation of a large regional planning project in the United States. The results provided thick descriptions of facilitation styles and revealed various communicative characteristics in facilitation. This study proposes a preliminary categorization to describe and classify facilitation styles. In this categorization, different styles are categorized as variants with secondary characteristics under two primary types. Richness and complexity are introduced as new metrics to measure facilitators’ strategic communication. This tentative categorization, combined with the analytical categories, can be seen as a step toward a more nuanced classification of facilitation styles.