Abstract
“Participation” in the process of problem-solving has been considered a useful device for a community system to work smoothly. Several studies have examined cases where actual participation or movements to activate participation had taken place. They reported that there were types of participation, and that the types were related to participants' personal attributes, such as occupation and education, as well as their image about how a community system should work. However, most of these studies reffered only to the existing correlations between the types of participation and the personal attributes and images of community system. They never went further to indicate causal relations between variables. Consequently, they failed to predict the probability of an existing community system becoming a “participatory type.”
As a step toward providing a measurement of the probability of change, the present study starts with the construction of a model based primarily on the perspective of participants. The model assumes that “participation” is not the only device to solve community problems, and that people can also choose other kinds of actions which might be a far more efficient way of doing things.
The major purposes of this study are :
1. To present all types of problem-solving and to distinguish “participation” from other types
2. To construct a selection-process model
3. To explain the causal determinants of participation in each stage of the process
The ways of solving community problem can be classified into three types : self-help, mutual-help, and public-help. Research data indicate that these three types are associated with such variables as age, length of residence, ratio of white-collar workers, ratio of nuclear families and so on, and also suggest that the patterns of these associations differ among the stages of selection-process.
