A comparison of PSM and non-PSM supported workshops: the creation and use of models

Applications of PSMs are extensively reported in the literature, however, their evaluation remains challenging. Moreover, scholars’ disagreement on how to evaluate and compare PSMs constrains research that seeks to show whether certain PSMs are more useful than others and better than doing nothing. Drawing on scholars’ suggestion to evaluate PSMs through a link between action, outcomes and context, we address this gap by adopting an exploratory, experimental research design to evaluate and compare three workshops supported by the use of (i) SCA, (ii) SSM and (iii) a non-PSM supported approach and report on the findings of a quantitative and qualitative analysis. These workshops were carried out with MSc students competent in the area of urban transformation. To evaluate the outcomes of the workshops we collected data in four ways: (i) questionnaires, (ii) video- and audio-records of the workshops, (iii) pictures of the workshop outcomes, and (iv) video- and audio-records of and notes taken during the reflective workshop and presentations made by the students. We placed the creation and use of models at the center of our analysis, which shows variation in the quality and usefulness of the three approaches depending on the issues at hand, the facilitation type and the outputs.