Sensemaking: An Analysis of Participatory and Automated Methods

Abstract

Participatory research involves the iterative process of action and reflection, with the involvement of community members rather than solely researchers. Several projects under the Center for Constructive Communication (CCC), such as RealTalk@MIT, involve community members in facilitated conversations to gain more insight into their experiences and perspectives. However, these participants do not have continued involvement in the next step in the process, sensemaking, where themes and subthemes from the conversations are generated. In order to evaluate a newer format of sensemaking that would make it more accessible to and incorporate the involvement of participants, I invited participants from RealTalk@MIT to make sense of their own conversation and noted the differences (small or significant) between the themes produced by the researchers involved in the original sensemaking team and the workshop participants. From there, I evaluated the effectiveness of the new workshop structure in terms of allowing participants to interact with their own voices, the differences between codes produced by both groups, and how those codes compare to computer-generated codes.