Concept Mapping Methodologies in Community Health Engagement
Summary
Concept mapping methodologies integrate qualitative and quantitative techniques to elicit and structure knowledge from diverse stakeholders, facilitating community health engagement by visualising priorities, relationships and strategies for health improvement. Originating in programme evaluation and social research, these approaches guide the identification of community needs, the prioritisation of interventions and the design of empowerment frameworks. The process typically involves brainstorming to generate diverse statements, sorting and rating them according to dimensions such as importance or feasibility, and applying statistical methods to produce multidimensional visual representations. Such maps enable public health planners, policymakers and community members to coalesce around a shared conceptual framework, ensuring that interventions reflect local contexts, social determinants and equity considerations. Recent applications have spanned rapid service gap analyses in urban settings, participatory development of self-management support strategies for underserved populations and global health equity in last mile communities. By fostering cross-sectoral dialogue and grounding action in collective intelligence, concept mapping has emerged as a powerful tool for bridging academic research and grassroots health initiatives globally.
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Concept Mapping Methodologies in Community Health Engagement publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in concept mapping methodologies in community health engagement across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Concept mapping: A mixed-method approach to visualising the relationships among ideas generated by stakeholders.
Group concept mapping: A participatory form of concept mapping in which a stakeholder group jointly brainstorms, sorts and rates statements to build a collective conceptual framework.
Multidimensional scaling: A statistical technique that positions statements in a geometric space based on similarity data.
Hierarchical cluster analysis: A method that groups statements into clusters according to their proximity in multidimensional space.
References
- “One program that could improve health in this neighbourhood is ____?” using concept mapping to engage communities as part of a health and human services needs assessment. BMC Health Services Research (2018).
- Last mile research: a conceptual map. Global Health Action (2021).
- Using Concept Mapping to Develop a Strategy for Self-Management Support for Underserved Populations Living With Chronic Conditions, British Columbia, August 2013–June 2014. Preventing Chronic Disease (2015).
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