Obviously, many content focus statements could yield an almost infinite number of appropriate statements, but experience shows that most groups can comfortably handle about 200 statements in a Concept Mapping project.

Many forms of statement generation can easily yield far more than 200 statements. The facilitator needs to consider various options for reducing the initial statement set to one of more reasonable size. The statement reduction issue is essentially a sampling one, and the normal principles of sampling apply.

For clarity, let’s assume that you initially obtain 500 statements, and you need to reduce this number to 200 final statements. You might consider one of the following actions.

Have a participant committee review the statements and weed them down.

Set up a procedure whereby the committee rates each statement on one or more characteristics (importance, readability, appropriateness for the focus) and select the 200 statements that have the best ratings.

Sample the statements directly

Conduct a simple random sampling of 200 of the 500 statements. (Drawback: Categories that had relatively few statements might wind up being eliminated by the “luck of the draw”.)

Group or stratify the statements into broad categories and then take a stratified random sample

This procedure would ensure that all of the strata would have some statements represented in the final set.

However it is accomplished, it is important that the facilitator keep in mind a key governing principle for the Concept Mapping process--that the process is objective, public, and participatory. As long as the facilitator can explain exactly how the initial statement set was reduced to the final set, participants can judge the fairness and potential for bias that may have been introduced. At all costs, the facilitator wants to avoid the situation where participants feel some “sleight of hand” or unaccountable hidden process was used to control the content of the map.