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"The Routledge Handbook of Applied Communication Research provides a state-of-the-art review of communication scholarship that addresses real-world concerns, issues, and problems. This comprehensive examination of applied communication research, including its foundations, research methods employed, ... more

"Our review of relevant literature identified the following eight issues related to communication for participatory development: 1. The concept of development needs to be reformulated in a manner that applies to human development in local communities, as well as the traditional focus on national dev ... elopment. 2. Participatory development requires dialogue—a symmetrical, two-way process of communication, but many prevailing approaches to development communication use an asymmetrical, one-way process of communication. 3. No model of the development process reconciles the demand for social change at the community level and the need for requisite changes at the individual level. 4. Scholars and practitioners agree that community members should determine the goals of development themselves, but the problem-specific nature of funding often means that external change agents impose development goals on communities. External change agents can play the valuable role of catalyst and facilitate the process, but motivation and leadership needs to come from within a community itself. 5. The role of confl ict in communication generally is ignored in participatory development, even though it is common feature of most communities. Therefore, a model of the process needs to recognize conflict and suggest methods to manage it. 6. Ownership, self-determination, and social change are considered necessary to build community capacity and to sustain the process of development without further outside stimuli. 7. Communities should have access to local media, such as community radio, posters/billboards, traveling theater groups, and even cell phones, to produce content for their development objectives rather than rely on content originating from external sources that primarily serve the purposes of those sources. 8. Self-assessment needs to guide the process and motivate sustained, collective action. A model of participatory development, thus, needs to be theoretically sound and useful to communication scholars but also useful to community leaders and communication practitioners. The model of communication for participatory development that we use to organize and synthesize the literature addresses these eight key issues, and it provides a tool useful for both research and practice. Specifically, because development is assumed to be “people oriented,” communication for participatory development needs to be based on dialogue, conflict management, and mutual understanding and agreement." Pages 507-508) more

Routledge Handbook of Applied Communication Research

Communication for Participatory Development: Dialogue, Action, and Change