Communities Advancing Resilience Toolkit (CART ... - OU Medicine

you administer the CART survey with participants before they take part in a community
conversation.
Instructions/Guidelines
Step 1: Clarify the purpose of your conversations. Community conversations should have
a purpose which you need to clarify for yourself and your participants. Be sure you know
why you are conducting conversations and what you intend to do with the information
gathered. Stay focused on your purpose as you develop questions and a structured guide,
identify participants, and facilitate and analyze the conversation.
Step 2: Prepare questions. Review the available CART questions and conduct background
research to augment them if necessary. Select, write, and edit questions to enable you to
gather the information you are seeking. Questions should be neutral, specific, openended,
and clearly worded. Avoid leading questions in which you imply an expected
answer within the question.
Step 3: Create a structured guide. The discussion should begin with broad questions that
get more specific as the session continues, relying on probes rather than leading
questions. Create a structured guide to keep the session on track and within time limits
(typically 1 to 3 hours). The structured guide should be based on the information to be
collected.
Step 4: Select and recruit participants. The optimal number of participants is 6 to 12.
When there are too few participants, information usually is not as rich or deep.
With too many participants, you may find it more difficult to stay within
time limits and there is an increased risk that some will not
participate. Participants should be selected because they have
knowledge about the specific topic or issue to be discussed.
Participants typically are similar in some ways though there may
be important differences as well. For CART conversations,
participants should be recruited within a community or within or
among community groups. For example, a conversation might involve representatives of
various sectors (e.g., education, emergency management, health, local leadership, or
media), organizations, or roles in the community. Alternatively, members may be selected
Communities Advancing Resilience Toolkit (CART) Page 24