A collaborative process model for community-based organizations

The purpose of this phenomenological research was to describe the role and utility of collaboration from the perspective of a collaborative group representing several different community-based, nonprofit agencies delivering gender specific services for juvenile females in several juvenile halls and detention camps in a metropolitan region in the United States. The research questions explored in this study were: (a) how is a collaborative effort experienced by members of a newly formed inter-organizational alliance in terms of trust; capacity to communicate and cooperate; perceived similarity between group members; and social influence? and (b) how was conflict, if any occurred, experienced during the collaborative effort?; A phenomenological method of data collection, organization and analysis was employed in this study. A modified approach was constructed in an effort to advance from the general tradition of phenomenological analysis to an explicit approach that, otherwise, narrowly focused the phenomenological approach onto the correspondences between participants' experiences and the theories of Self-categorization and Social-identity used as support for this study.; Findings indicate that the role and utility of collaboration was overshadowed in the experience of the participants by a lack of shared identity and little or no cohesive group structure. Descriptions of the experiences of the different social orientations including trust, perceived similarity, communication-cooperation, and social influence yielded twelve emergent themes, which could presumably explain the circumstances under which the participants came to experience the collaborative effort.