Author: Robin Ray

Reporting the project

The first part of the project to be reported was the use of ecomaps as a data gathering tool. As ecomapping had not been used as a research tool in chronic illness research, it was easy to decide that a journal article describing the use of this method could be published. We constructed the paper to describe the origins and applications of ecomaps, our use of ecomaps in this study and the type of results we achieved. It was important to provide some examples of the data generated so that readers could gain a clear understanding of the usefulness of ecomaps in research. We decided to submit the paper (Ray & Street, 2005a) to a nursing journal, so that nurses could learn about using ecomapping in nursing research. We also thought that ecomaps would be useful for identifying support service needs for people being cared for at home.

Next we began working with the themes that had been generated through the data analysis. We found it helpful to use cognitive concept mapping to gather like themes together, identify the links between repeated themes and develop a central concept that became the focus of a paper. This process generated several topics for journal articles and conference presentations. The next step was to go back to the literature and review work that had been done around the central focus for each paper. This was a time consuming task, but it enabled us to connect our findings to the literature and choose the most appropriate findings to publish. It was important to carefully select findings and to avoid the temptation to "dump data". Being excited about your findings does not make them publishable. We needed to select findings that illustrated the new information gained for the project and then identify the most appropriate journal in which to publish them. Remember to check the journal's audience to make sure you have a good fit between your outcomes and the needs and interests of the journal readership.

We targeted a social health journal to publish the ecomap material concerning the dynamic nature of support networks in degenerative illness as we thought that a range of health and social care workers would be interested in this information.

The size of ecomaps as well as their complexity created a challenge when preparing journal articles and conference presentations. We had to think carefully about how to choose the most representative ecomaps and tabulated data to support our findings. The community table and some of the graphs were published by Health and Social Care in the Community (Ray & Street, 2005c) and presented at an international conference of health professionals and researchers (Ray & Street, 2005b).

When presenting ecomap data at conferences or seminars, it is important to allow time to explain how the ecomaps are constructed and to clearly interpret the chosen ecomaps so that the decision trail is transparent and findings are easily understood. Audiences are interested in the process of developing ecomaps and fascinated by the data they produce, so be prepared for questions.

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