| The traditional approach to social impact assessment (SIA) is technocratic, using secondary data and scientific expertise to project future community conditions. Another approach is more participatory building on input from citizens likely affected by proposed Environmental Impact Study (EIS) alternatives. This dissertation examines one such participatory approach called the Interactive Community Forum (ICF), which provides a process for obtaining residents' judgments of community-based impacts. The methods used in the ICF represent an interdisciplinary form of SIA that builds on research in small group deliberation, public involvement, critical education, and community theory. The ICF methodology is presented here, as is an examination of its effectiveness in the context of an assessment of the social impacts of salmon recovery on communities in the Inland Northwest. First, research is presented on the effects of small group interaction on the quality of residents' judgments. Key results indicate that the group processes employed were more effective when a greater diversity of individuals, as measured by their community roles, occupation, age and gender, engaged in information sharing and dialogue. Secondly, the ability of actively engaged residents to identify the range of social impacts identified in an open public forum is examined for reasons of public inclusion. Results indicate that this group of residents was not capable of identifying the full range of community-level impacts as identified by self-selected community residents, but they were found to be essential in broadening the scope of impacts considered. Thirdly, the contribution of community roles to the identification of impacts was examined. Results of this analysis indicate that the types of roles within different types of communities differed significantly. However, residents in some roles do not exist in small homogeneous communities making it difficult to achieve the desired level of workgroup diversity. Lastly, methods of indicator selection and impact projection are compared for a particular technocratic and a participatory approach. While results indicate that each have problems to overcome, when used together, a more holistic picture of impacts emerges. Areas for future research and development of the ICF process and participatory approaches to SIA are proposed that build on these findings. |
