STAKEHOLDERS’ PREFERENCES FOR PARTICIPATION PROCESSES Discrete choice experiments to examine neighboring stakeholders’ preferences for participation processes in construction projects

Stakeholder participation can increase the quality of decisions, but the quality of a decision is determined by the quality of the process. Although several researchers identified features of best participation practices, the perspective of the stakeholders and quantitative methods are unsatisfactory explored. Consequently, this study aims to increase the understanding of stakeholders’ preferences regarding features of participation processes in real-estate development projects using discrete choice models.
A literature review produced a state-of-the-art overview of the advantages and features of best participation practices. The core advantage of stakeholder participation is that it enhances the quality of the decisions. A selection of the features is transformed into attributes and attribute levels. These attribute levels represent hypothetical participation process alternatives and are combined into choice sets with two alternatives. Respondents indicated in an online questionnaire in what alternative they most likely participate. The experience, familiarity, and motivation for participation, and demographic information of respondents are also collected.
Descriptive analyses, multinomial logit – and latent class models on a sample of 123 respondents established insights into stakeholders’ preferences for participation processes. Strikingly, males are more motivated to participate compared to females. Stakeholders’ preferences for attributes of participation processes show similarities and differences. Stakeholders prefer to be involved for the first time in the design phase and they prefer to receive information from websites. For the objective of the involvement, stakeholders favor impacting the decisions. In contrast, for the participation technique differences in preferences appear. For the majority of the sample, the attributes objective of the involvement and the moment of the first involvement are the most important.