My big work-related task this month is to pull together my focus group findings into something approximating a theoretically relevant conference paper. I like to start with visualizations.

This chart is derived from a code scheme we developed to categorize human security practitioners’ responses in focus groups to the question: what factors facilitate or inhibit the emergence of new issues on global policy agenda? Answers fell into five broad buckets, and this is an overview of the contents of the various buckets and how they relate to one another and to the extent literature on advocacy networks. Of most interest to my project is the highly central yet largely under-theorized category “network effects.”

Reactions on either the chart, the theoretical argument embodied here, or the data very welcome.

Also, a bleg: do any readers know of user-friendly visualization software to make a graph like this interactive? I’d like viewers to be able to move their pointer over a code-name and see the code definition, and over a code bucket and see a frequency distribution of associated codes.