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A NOTE FROM DR. DERVIN:
Thank you for your interest in my work. Before placing your request, please help me by reading this information carefully:

  1. This service is provided as a voluntary service—no funds support it. Please help by following instructions.
  2. The items you have requested are copyrighted. They will be shared with you assuming you are using them for educational or other not-for-profit work.
  3. It is also assumed that you are asking for an electronic copy because you are unable to secure the document at your library, through your organization’s online library resources, or by purchasing the Sense-Making Methodology reader: Selected writings of Brenda Dervin, now available through Amazon.com or by calling Hampton Press at 1-800-894-8955. Ordering from Hampton Press usually yields faster results and, if you are a member of an academic organization, you may be eligible for a discount. Understandably, I cannot provide you with chapters from the book unless you face circumstances that prevent its purchase.
  4. It is important to understand that Sense-Making is a complex methodology with many components. It is rare to find an empirical exemplar of its use that encompasses all the methodological mandates. Because of this, users with a serious interest in the methodology are advised to read deeply into the metatheoretic writings which form the foundation of the methodology’s moves to method and to skim widely empirical applications—even those not in their own substantive terrains. Many of the most fundamental metatheoretic writings are available in the Sense-Making Methodology Reader (see 3).
  5. The papers are available online as private access documents. You must not publish the private access URLs or share them with anyone. When citing, please refer to the abstract links.
  6. Sense-Making Methodology has been 30 years in development and is still developing. Hence, a paper written in 1983, or even 1992, will necessarily be outdated. Therefore, If you refer to Sense-Making based on earlier papers, it is important that you indicate in a footnote or endnote that there have been subsequent developments in the methodology but your work is marked as of the date of the references you refer to.
  7. As you know, there are many references to sense-making in various discourse community literatures—for instance, sense-making as a phenomena is referred to in Weick’s organizational communication work, in cultural studies, in various branches of phenomenology/ethnomethodology, and now as a popular reference in many literature genres. Most often, the reference is to an internal activity assumed to be common to human beings. There are variations on this theme. Weick’s sense-making (one of the most common sources of the term when you perform a search on the ISI database) is broader, as is Dervin’s. However, both refer to a worldview and a mandate that research attend to internal and external sense-making and -unmaking. Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology shares much with Weick’s focus on sense-making and has also attempted to become a metatheoretically informed methodology with deliberate and systematic links to method. Furthermore, Sense-Making Methodology focuses on both internal and external behavings—cognizing, emoting, acting, and so on—that are referred to in the Methodology as sense-(un)making verbings.
  8. Because the development of Sense-Making Methodology has been explicitly methodologically focused, virtually everything authored by Dervin pertains to the development process—irrespective of the substantive focus. Dervin’s Sense-Making has been used in a wide variety of contexts, but the methodological interests of Sense-Making have been concerned with these only to the extent that each context pushes the methodology to a new kind of test. Of course, because Sense-Making focuses on verbings, it explicitly posits that we can gain a fuller understanding of human sense-making and sense-unmaking if we conceptualize context theoretically and posit that only a few of the important variants in sense-making across time-space are explained by topic, domain, or other generalized clumpings of situations and events into groups based on structural arrangements (e.g., news vs. entertainment, school vs. work, family vs. community, etc.) or by personality-based clumplings of people into groups based on assumed-to-be-constant cognitive attributes, attitudinal attributes, psychological attributes, and so forth. It is not that Sense-Making excludes such variables/factors/dimensions, but rather that the Methodology refocuses attention from static conditions to process conditions and to analytics based on how people sense-make and unmake sense as they move through time-space

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