Using cognitive mapping in dissertation work

Cognitive mapping is a soft OR technique (Eden et al., 1983). It is quite useful in (a) doing literature review and (b) in exploring a problem-sitution in a case study. I deal with the first task (a) here, using an example from my recent literature review on "social networking for marketing". From my literature review, I produced the following diagram:

To produce the diagram, I spent about 2 weeks to browse through some relevant academic articles and whitepapers downloaded from the Internet. I tried to make use  of these reading materials. Then, in one afternoon before I was to deliver a lecture on this topic, I used a piece of paper to write down the key variables and then linked them up to form the the map. The arrows in the map could mean depict cause-effect relationships. I can add + or - signs in the arrows: + means an increase variable (a) causes an increase in variable (b) while - means an increase in variable (a) causes a decrease in variable (b).

By constructing a cognitive map, I can synthesize the major ideas, policy options, concerns, and desirable outcomes from the literature into a holistic picture. Different people, on reading the same set of readings will come up with different cognitive maps, because of differences in working experience, in standpoints, and levels of intellectual ability, etc. Once this synthesis exercise is done, I can present synthesized picture to my class; constructing such a map is itself a form of thinking about the topic.

The cognitive map can be considered as a concrete outcome from your literature review effort; the cognitive map itself can be further analzyed by examining the various causal loops, by labelling the variables as output, outcome, policy option, input (controllable), input (uncontrollable) and intermediate variables and by grouping the variables into a number of themes. Such a map is also easier for the dissertation marker to grasp than just written content in a dissertation report.

Cognitive mapping can also be used in problem exploration, see for example, Ho and Jackson (1987). This is not covered in this article.


Related lecture notes

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Note 2

References
Eden, C., Jones, S. and Sims, D. (1983) Messing about in problems: an informal structured approach in their identification and management, Pergamon Press, Oxford.
Ho, J.K.K. and Jackson, M.C. (1987) "Building a "rich picture" and asessing a "quality management" program at Thornton Printing Company", Cybernetics and Systems 18:381