Conversations About Group Concept Mapping: Applications, Examples, and Enhancements

Conversations About Group Concept Mapping: Applications, Examples, and Enhancements takes a concise, practice-based approach to group concept mapping. After defining the method, demonstrating how to design a project, and providing guidelines to analyze the results, this book then dives into real research exemplars.  Conversations with the researchers are based on in depth interviews that connected method, practice and results.

The conversations are from a wide variety of research settings, that include mapping the needs of at-risk African American youth, creating dialogue within a local business community, considering learning needs in the 21st century, and identifying the best ways to support teens receiving Supplemental Social Security Income. The authors reflect on the commonalities between the cases and draw out insights into the overall group concept mapping method from each case.

Mary Kane, MSLIS, is President of Concept Systems, Inc., a social research and evaluation firm specializing in capturing the knowledge and opinions of people and agencies to improve organizations, cultures and environments. Ms. Kane assesses and addresses the needs of local, national and international agencies, guiding government offices, foundations, professional associations, corporations and academic and research institutions to awareness, consensus and decisions. A special emphasis in Mary’s work is creating awareness of “group wisdom” in a community or organization, and guiding groups to harness collective knowledge to produce meaningful, measurable and useful outcomes for program, policy and population change.  Ms. Kane is author or co-author of many publications on the applications of Group Concept Mapping (GCM) in organizational decision-making and strategic planning and evaluation.  Her current research focuses on “Valuing Voice” in underrepresented communities to support sustainable change; and expanding the definition of competencies for evaluation.  As first author of the authoritative text on concept mapping, Concept Mapping for Planning and Evaluation, Mary was able to use her deep knowledge in partnership with Dr. Rosas to create, in this volume, an exciting expansion of GCM’s story