Glossary

Short definitions for the words used on this site. The method is set out in Reinhard and Reddy (2026), Designing Sensemaking Studies, Palgrave Macmillan. A longer account of the geometry is on How the method works.

Participant-interpreted research

A study in which the person who shares a story also says what that story means. Their reading is stored with the story. It is not added later by a coder.

Active Sensemaking

The name Spryng uses for this way of working. People describe a specific experience, interpret it themselves, and a group then looks at the patterns those interpretations make. It draws on Brenda Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology. It is not a score on a fixed questionnaire.

Story prompt

The invitation to share one experience. A story prompt asks about a moment that already happened ("Tell us about a time…"), not a general opinion ("How satisfied are you?"). See How do you write a story prompt that invites experience rather than opinion?.

Signifier

A question the participant answers about their own story. On a triad, the signifier is a triangle whose three corners are phrases. The participant places a marker somewhere inside it. On a slider, the signifier has two poles. The placement is their interpretation, not an analyst's code.

Triad

A signifier with three corners. The answer is three weights that sum to one: a point on a triangle. Only the relative size of the parts carries information. See How the method works.

Compositional data

Data made of parts of a whole, such as the three weights of a triad. The parts cannot move independently, because they have to sum to a constant. Ordinary averages and correlations on the raw weights can describe that constraint rather than what people meant.

Simplex

The shape those weights live on. For three parts that sum to one, it is a triangle. For two parts, it is a line segment.

Closed geometric mean

The average that respects that shape. Take the geometric mean of each part, then rescale the parts so they sum to one again. It is the centre used on How the method works. An ordinary arithmetic mean of the raw positions is not that centre.

Pattern

A cluster or region of placements that several participants made, read together with the stories those placements point to. A pattern is not a score, and it is not a finding until someone can open the stories behind it.

Self-signification

The act of placing your own story on a signifier. It moves interpretation from the analyst to the narrator. It does not, by itself, make the signifier a good question, and the geometry does not make the report more truthful. Those are design questions. See What changes when participants interpret their own stories?.

Co-design

Fitting the prompt and the signifiers to the people and the setting before collection, and reading the patterns with them afterwards. The checklist Spryng uses draws on Dervin's Sense-Making, Liberating Structures, the CDE model from Human Systems Dynamics, and the realist formula context + mechanism = outcome.

Minimum-N

A floor on how small a group can be before a sliced view is shown. It is a proxy for a question: could a reasonable person guess who is behind a dot? It is not a single universal number. See How small can a group be before you stop reporting it separately?.