Requirement engineering is a technique for analyzing and documenting the requirement of users. Requirement engineering is a necessary prerequisite to build a healthy participation between customers and the organization for better understanding the requirements from customers by the software developers. The requirements engineering phase of software development process is characterized by the strength and significance of participation activities. During this phase, the various stakeholders must be able to communicate their requirements to the analysts and the analysts need to be able to communicate the specifications they generate back to the stakeholders for validation. This paper describes a field investigation into the problems of participation between disparate communities involved in the requirements specification activities. The results of this study are discussed in terms of their relation to three major participation barriers: 1) ineffectiveness of the current participation channels; 2) restrictions on expressiveness imposed by notations; and 3) social and organizational barriers. The results confirm that organizational and social issues have great influence on the effectiveness of participation.