When creating the concept map for my thesis, I began to realize that I don’t actually have that many actors in my Nextdoor case study. I thought perhaps I should bring in more local organizations like Collins View NET or perhaps the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management, but they aren’t as relevant to my study as the individual neighbors. I played with the idea of including certain specific groups of neighbors (students, families, retirees, etc) into my map too to scale up the count of my actors. Eventually I realized that perhaps my study isn’t actor heavy (well it is, but all the actors — neighbors — can be grouped under one category) but rather it’s more concept heavy. It deals with trust, resilience, interactions, social capital, insiders and outsiders. I included those on my concept map knowing that those are the concepts I’m dealing with but still feeling unsure about the “correctness” of my map. Throughout this process I have been grateful that the scale of my project is very manageable, but this project almost made me worry that it was too simple.
We read Canas et al.’s article “How good is my concept map? Am I a good Cmapper?” to get the basics on creating a successful concept map, but in the end it basically said Cmapping is like poetry so you can follow all the rules and it still might not be excellent. So alas, I took their advice to include enough but not too many actors, and then set off to hierarchically arrange them. Third Places, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness ended up on three corners, and Neighbors ended up somewhat near the center, which combine to be the main themes of my study. The next tier of my map were the types of relationships: Indirect and Direct Interactions. These can both be helpful but generally I see direct interactions as being more valuable to building social capital. After that, the final tier was the nature of the interaction: trust building versus trust eroding. I almost included insiders and outsiders, but I thought they could be encompassed well enough in the trust tier, and I didn’t want to clutter it up too much anyway.
Overall this exercise was somewhat helpful, but I’m still unsure if my map is “good” or not. It helped me to visually lay out what my project is and what the important themes are and how they relate, so if that was the goal of this exercise then I guess it was successful! I’m only left with the lingering question of scale — should I include more actors? Who would they be?
Cañas, et al. 2015. “How good is my concept map? Am I a good Cmapper?” Knowledge Management & E-Learning, 7(1), 6–19.