This semester, I’m taking the required CONF 812- Qualitative Research Methods course. Our final project is conducting a small study and creating a research portfolio. I’ve chosen to pilot a few test questions that could be implemented in the Peace Engineering Lab’s SenseMaker framework that will be rolled out in the fall. Some of the questions are derived from the SenseMaker Design Workshop that I held for the Carter School’s Spring Peace Week.
My goal is to collect at least 20 stories for the pilot from March 29th-April 5th. You can help by…
- Sharing an experience at bit.ly/conf812pilot
- Sending the link to one or two friends and getting them to share
Click the button below to share your experience on the pilot SenseMaker site. Sharing your experience should take around 10-15 minutes:
Excerpt from my class proposal on why I’m doing this:
“The first stage of project development is the creation of a SenseMaker framework that adequately captures experiences that provide the raw material for conflict resolution practice. In SenseMaker methodology, participants are asked to share an experience in response to one or two “story prompts” that elicit a wide range of lived experience, positive or negative. SenseMaker does not collect narrative that is evaluative or opinionated. These lived experiences are then self-interpreted by the storyteller with multiple question types on the SenseMaker survey, including triangle questions that provide lenses for important elements of theory and practice.
The story prompts are of central importance to the entire SenseMaker design, because they determine the scope and focus of narratives that are then interpreted later in the survey. Inadequate testing of the prompting questions can waste research resources if participants choose to share experiences that are not relevant to the researcher. The research questions of the proposed pilot study are pragmatic: What kind of narrative material do the three proposed prompts provide? How could the story prompts and SenseMaker questions being tested contribute to complexity-informed conflict resolution practice (decision-making, fractal engagement, anticipation, mapping elements of conflict systems)?”
Keil Eggers 