Concept Systems, Inc. would like to introduce our clients and friends to Catherine Van Brunschot. Ms. Van Brunschot will be serving as one of our Senior Consultants. Ms. Van Brunschot comes to us with a strong background in organizational development and training. She holds a Master of Social Work degree in Management as well as a Postgraduate Diploma in Organizational Behavior. Her employment experience includes positions in government, academia, and private industry, and she has a special interest in cross-cultural and leadership issues.

Dr. Patricia O'Campo:
Dr. O’Campo is a social epidemiologist who has conducted research predominantly at Johns Hopkins University on the social determinants of health and well being among women and children for over 15 years. She pioneered the application of multilevel modeling in the field of maternal and child health in the early 1990s to understand the effects of urban residential neighborhoods on the risk of intimate partner violence during the childbearing year and on low birth weight. She has conducted a number of clinic and community based evaluations of programs concerning smoking cessation, prevention of perinatal transmission of HIV, and prevention of infant mortality. She is the Director of The Centre for Research on Inner City Health (www.crich.ca) at St Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Canada which is recognized nationally and internationally as a center of excellence for inner city health research and whose mission is to improve the health of urban populations through a program of policy relevant research.

Dr. O'Campo's Research:
Neighborhoods and Well-Being
The most recent project that we used the CSI software for was entitled “Neighborhoods and Well-Being: A concept mapping pilot project.” We conducted this pilot study to understand how neighborhoods may affect well-being, and mental well-being in particular, because these mechanisms are not well understood. We therefore used concept mapping to obtain information from those with ‘lived experiences’ about which neighborhood factors are important for mental health as well as how those neighborhoods characteristics influence the mental health of residents, including introducing a level of complexity through comparisons by income and gender.

The focus statement asked during the brainstorming question was: “What are some characteristics of neighborhoods that could relate in any way, good or bad, to a persons' mental well-being?”

The CSI technicians guided us on how to narrow down our list of statements from 400 to 120 which enabled a clearer focus. The rating categories were regarding neighborhoods and their relation to good/positive mental health, poor/negative mental health, obesity and physical fitness. The project took approximately 10 months to complete with 40 low income and non low income participants from downtown Toronto and Scarborough completing the brainstorming and sorting and rating groups. The information from this study using the CSI software will make important contributions to the literature on how neighborhoods affect mental well-being and will futher allow us to proceed with a larger study with more participants covering a larger area of Toronto.

CS Global
We’re excited to announce that CSI is preparing to release a new web-based application of our Concept Mapping technology – CS Global. CSI has developed and utilized CS Global for several years with large-scale consulting projects. We believe it will be of great benefit to research projects of almost any size. The program allows participants to contribute to a Concept Systems project by accessing a custom website and completing the activities assigned to them by their project administrator, from idea generation (brainstorming) to sorting and rating. This application is ideal for, but not limited to, participants who may be geographically distant or pressed for time. In addition, at the click of a button, the project administrator or researcher can instantly import all of the web-collected data directly into the Concept System Core software, eliminating the time consuming task of data entry.

CSI currently offers this service on a limited basis, in which we conduct all project administrator duties. Our new release will allow researchers as much or as little direct control over the administrative features as they wish. We are currently testing a beta version of this more customizable CS Global and have been receiving stellar reports from participants and administrators.

Look for its official release in September 2006!

Did you get Version 4 yet?

Don’t forget to download and preview CSI’s recently released, new version of the Core software. This is a major release and offers many new features and enhancements, including:
· Collection of data from up to 50 participants (25% more than previous versions!)
· Improved and integrated reporting capabilities, new reports, and improved layouts and legends
o Respondent (demographic question) reports with pie and bar charts
o Go Zone reports function enables in-depth view of cluster ratings
· Automatic tally of selected users in Pattern Matches and Go Zones
Full integration with CSI’s new Internet data collection system 'Concept Systems Global'
Already have a previous version? This upgrade is free of charge and fully compatible with your previous projects.

For more information, please visit: http://www.conceptsystems.com/Version4.php

Concept Mapping for Planning and Evaluation - the new volume by Mary Kane and Bill Trochim, to be published by Sage in early Fall 2006.
This is the primer on Concept Mapping for group intelligence and decision making that works.
It’s a thorough, accessible guide to Concept Mapping in its most useful form for social or organizational researchers in any context. The volume covers a lot of information of interest to researchers who value stakeholder engagement and input, including the history of this form of concept mapping, and the advantages that group or community concept mapping has over other kinds of group decision processes. With straightforward language and useful examples, the book describes in detail the six major steps in the conduct of group concept mapping, and shares with the reader both the technical operations of concept mapping and the equally important process facilitation and guidance techniques that the authors have developed. Explaining the quantitative mixed-methods research design that underlies the concept mapping model and linking that research design to the qualitative processes that a good Concept Mapper will develop, the authors clarify that concept mapping is indeed a “whole brain” approach to group decision making. Examples from work with clients like the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, and state government, as well as interesting examples from concept mapping in social research contexts, illustrate each step in the process. References that provide recommendations for further reading are included, as well as process worksheets for practitioners.

THE complete guide, to make you a mapping maven in no time! More details to come…