Integrating Communication Skills and Planning Techniques

Practitioners have long stressed the need to teach professional commumcations skills to planning students. This paper describes ten years of experience in teaching a course in which communications skills and techniques of gathering and analyzing information are taught concurrently while investigating a problem of importance in the community. The course involves an ongoing collaboration, a "marriage of convenience," between an academic and a planner, casting city/county planning staff as clients for students This has proven useful for pedagogy and has had some positive impact on the community.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/69149/2/10.1177_0739456X9201100206.pd

Some Uses and Potentials of Qualitative Methods in Planning

Planners use methods borrowed from many disciplines. These are usually modified and adapted to meet planner's needs to acquire and sift through many diverse information sources helpful in dealing with complex problems. The quantitative methods which planners use are well known, well established in practice, and acknowledged by most as tools of the planners' trade. In contrast to this, most planners also use qualitative methods but these are rarely explicitly acknowledged.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68912/2/10.1177_0739456X8600600110.pd

A typology of designs for social research in the built environment

This article presents a typology of designs for social research in the built environment. Currently there is no such typology, while the notion of ‘research design’ is less known in the built environment compared to the social sciences. Twenty-five subtypes are identified and clustered into 10 prototypical designs, namely: (1) surveys, (2) experiments, (3) modelling, simulation, mapping and visualisation, (4) textual and narrative studies, (5) field studies, (6) case studies, (7) intervention research, (8) evaluation research, (9) participatory action research and (10) meta-research. After determining the extent to which these designs feature in actual studies, the designs are classified according to six design considerations, including research – context, aim and purpose, methodological – paradigm and approach, and source of data. The typology contributes towards greater clarity in terms of ‘research design’, improved teaching of research methodology and greater methodological coherence in projects.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tsrm2