A foundational aspect of problem structuring is orienting yourself and gathering information about the problem situation. This is your opportunity to discover what is already known about the problem situation and find out what interventions have been tried previously.
Identifying Stakeholders
It is often helpful to start by finding potential stakeholders in the problem situation whom you may want to engage with. By doing this, you can identify multiple perspectives and interact more effectively with a target population, as well as discovering alternate ways of conceptualizing the problem situation. Furthermore, by finding and engaging with key stakeholders, the research can be done more ethically.
Discovering Knowledge
Building robust knowledge around the problem situation enables all perspectives to be integrated while actually structuring the problem. Discovering knowledge is iterative, emergent, and freeform in nature, as demonstrated by the visual below.
You will find that for each problem situation you investigate, the knowledge discovery phase is going to look different. For example, if you want to prevent plastic pollution going into a local river, you might begin by reading about nonprofit organizations removing plastic from waterways around the world. Or if you are working with a group of people who are living in particularly impoverished areas, a good first step may then be to talk to local government leaders focused on policies to counteract poverty in their region.
Example: Permissions in a Global Health Problem Situation
Imagine you want to interview communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo to see how they were directly affected by the Ebola Virus outbreak. This is a possible way to conduct these interviews:
Potential Participants in Interviews
- Experts
An expert is someone who may study the problem situation or know about theory and tools that could be applicable. They may be people who research the area, people who know the culture and/or people who have done research on the problem. Through interviewing experts, you can benefit from their specialized knowledge and skills. Besides interviewing, you can also poll experts or engage with their expertise during the research effort.
- Community Members
Community members could be individuals directly impacted by the problem, or policy makers, reporters, and non-government agency workers who are closely exposed to the problem. Through interviewing community members, you can determine whether a proposed intervention is implemented or avoiding unintended consequences.
Personal Project
Who is involved in your problem situation? How do you identify stakeholders?
Starting the process of identifying who is in a situation can be challenging . Begin by writing a list. Maybe that list only has one person on it or maybe there are many. That’s okay! This is just a place to begin to think about the situation and who might be helpful.
In doing this, you begin to identify gaps in your knowledge by noting those you do know are involved and those you have not thought about. This list will certainly evolve as you continue through the process of doing literature reviews and expert and key informant interviews.
