The primary purpose of this guide is to get you started with Anthropac, but you may also need a little guidance on 3CM data collection. There are several journal articles that cover the 3CM process, all of which have slight variations. Below is the process I used.

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Basic 3CM Process

In the basic 3CM process, participants individually respond to a prompt using cards displaying terms that pertain to the subject of interest. In the sample study detailed here, the prompt was, Imagine someone you know recognizes your knowledge of local water issues (water quality and quantity) and has asked for your honest perspective on the relationships between water and the regional economy. The participants were provided with a deck of cards that included terms related to water and the economy in Northern Florida and Southern Georgia, such as jobs, aquifer, agricultural best management practices, ecosystem health, water conservation, litigation, costs, industry, and water pollution. Participants then completed a four-step process:

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1. Sort the cards into two stacks. Go through each of the cards in the deck and divide them into two piles – one for those terms you would include in your response to the prompt and another for those terms you would leave out. Those terms not selected for inclusion are set aside and not included in the remaining steps.
    

2. Add additional terms. Using blanks cards, add any other terms that you would include while responding to the prompt. Combine these cards with the cards chose in step 1.
    

3. Create clusters of cards. Divide the cards into clusters of terms that logically go together.
    

4. Name the clusters. Using colored cards, assign a name to each of the cluster groups.
    

When this process is complete, the mental model for a single participant has been recorded. In the following steps these individual results will be combined into composite maps using Anthropac.

 

 

Determining the terms to provide participants

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There is more than one way to develop the set of terms/cards for the 3CM activity. For the sample study, terms were primarily selected using open-ended 3CM. Open-ended 3CM is a variation on the structured 3CM activity described above. The process is essentially the same except no predefined terms/cards are provided; instead, all of the cards are blank and the participants have to come up with all their own terms to respond to the prompt. We conducted the open-ended 3CM with approximately 10 individuals. The terms that repeatedly came up made it to the final set of 57 cards for the structured 3CM. Typically you don’t want to have more than 30 to 50 cards in your final deck (although obviously the limit was exceeded in the example shown here). When you cross the 30 to 50 card threshold, the activity can become overwhelming to the participants.

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Developing the prompt

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Perhaps the most critical element of the 3CM study design is the prompt. It seems simple, but every word influences participants' responses. Let me give you an example. As I stated above, the prompt for this sample study was Imagine someone you know recognizes your knowledge of local water issues (water quality and quantity) and has asked for your honest perspective on the relationships between water and the regional economy. This is the fine-tuned version of the prompt. One of the earlier versions started Imagine your neighbor… This small difference had a big impact on participants' responses. When prompted with the word neighbor, participants pictured their own neighbor and the neighbor's specific knowledge level and biases, which shaped their responses.

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Step 2: Download and Install Software

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