Is Causal Map right for you?
Use Causal Map
if you:
- want to capture what your sources actually say, systematically and transparently.
- have a relatively large amount of narrative or text data (enough to provide at least 20-30 causal links).
- need help to organise a large number of links and summarise them into an overview or synthesis.
- have information from more than one source (for example different respondents, different documents, or different places in one document) and the information about the source is important to you: they aren’t all interchangeable.
- are interested in possible differences between groups of sources
- maybe don’t have a preconceived idea of the contents or boundaries of the map.
Don’t use Causal Map
if you:
- only have a relatively small map which you can manage with traditional tools for drawing network diagrams (e.g. PowerPoint, kumu.io etc.).
- have a relatively small amount of text in which you want to locate very accurately a small number of specific high-stakes causal connections.
- need to analyse quantitative data and/or need to do precise mathematical modelling, e.g. of future states of a system under certain conditions.
- would like to sketch out a plan (e.g. Theory of Change or similar) without much reference to the different sources underpinning each link.