CITATION AND COPYRIGHT INFORMATION:
Cite as: Dervin, B., & Frenette, M. (2001). Sense-Making Methodology: Communicating communicatively with campaign audiences. In R. E. Rice & C. K. Atkin (Eds.), Public communication campaigns (3rd ed., pp. 69-87). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Reprinted in: B. Dervin & L. Foreman-Wernet (with E. Lauterbach) (Eds.). (2003). Sense-Making Methodology reader: Selected writings of Brenda Dervin (pp. 233-251). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
© Hampton Press and Brenda Dervin (2003), reprinted by permission of Sage Publications (2001).

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ABSTRACT:
This is the third of three versions of chapters Dervin has written for the Sage Publications edited volumes entitled Public communication campaigns. For this version, originally published in 2001, Dervin and her co-author Frenette advance the presentation of the earlier chapters although this chapter devotes more space to Sense-Making studies and campaign design and less to critiques of traditional, and still dominant, approaches to campaign research and design. The chapter starts with a call for dialogic campaign design and reviews the mandates for dialogic approaches to campaign design as they have emerged from the literature over time since the 1960s. The authors then review the Sense-Making Methodology—its basic assumptions and the core metatheoretic metaphor used in the methodology to inform all aspects of research and campaign design. The chapter describes and illustrates the application of Sense-Making to interviewing, to the analysis of research data, and drawing conclusions from data for campaign design. The chapter concludes with examples in the context of a series of communication campaigns relating to communicating with adolescents regarding smoking, general population adults regarding AIDS, potential blood donors regarding informational blocks to donating, and cancer clinic patients regarding their information needs. In all of Dervin’s writings, later works introduce new terminology and alter assumptions—for example, later Sense-Making is described as beyond constructivism. Most of the fundamental assumptions and arguments remain the same, however. The Dervin chapters in the two other volumes of Public communication campaigns are substantially different and are, in effect, entirely different presentations. See Dervin (1981) and Dervin (1989).

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OTHER MATERIALS BY THESE AUTHORS ON THIS WEB SITE:
For Dervin,
See:  http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/AAauthors/authorlistdervin.html
For Frenette,
See:http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/AAauthors/authorlistfrenette.html