University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

A phrase mining and qualitative comparative analysis incorporating stakeholder perspectives in international engineering projects

Schreiber, Kelsey L.

Content Files
SCHREIBER-THESIS-2019.pdf

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/106282

Description

Title
A phrase mining and qualitative comparative analysis incorporating stakeholder perspectives in international engineering projects
Author(s)
Schreiber, Kelsey L.
Issue Date
2019-12-13
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Rodríguez, Luis
Committee Member(s)
  • Hansen, Alan
  • Michelson, Hope
Department of Study
Engineering Administration
Discipline
Agricultural & Biological Engr
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
M.S.
Degree Level
Thesis
Date of Ingest
2020-03-02T22:03:25Z
Keyword(s)
  • Big data
  • Data mining
  • International development
  • Contextual engineering
  • Monitoring and evaluation
  • Rural water
Abstract
Water projects in developing countries are often perceived as failures; however, with a variety of major actors involved in these projects, the definition of a successful project is hard to find. This research demonstrates and quantifies the mismatch in the project evaluation criteria of four main stakeholders: engineer, funder, government, and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs). I compile stakeholder project documentation and metadata into a novel Stakeholder Evaluation Database (SED), which I then mine to find top-ranked representative phrases for each stakeholder. The comparison of top representative phrases shows differing stakeholder priorities: Engineers focus on project travel and documentation, funders focus on budget and performance, governments focus on development issues like health, gender, and environment, and NGOs focus on motivation and technical specifications. These representative phrases are compared across stakeholders using cosine similarity to quantify the gap between stakeholder priorities. I find that governments and NGO representative phrases are the least similar, while engineers and NGOs are the most similar. I then use qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to determine underlying patterns of success and failure by constructing success and failure pathways composed of top representative phrases for each stakeholder. QCA shows that a stakeholder's success and failure pathways are significantly correlated with predicting their outcomes but perform poorly at predicting other stakeholder's outcomes. This project contributes a new methodological approach to understanding the definition of success to better evaluate project sustainability in international engineering projects and emphasizes the importance of inter-stakeholder communication to support project success.
Graduation Semester
2019-12
Type of Resource
text
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/106282
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2019 Kelsey Schreiber

Owning Collections

Graduate Dissertations and Theses at Illinois PRIMARY
Graduate Theses and Dissertations at Illinois
Dissertations and Theses - Agricultural and Biological Engineering