TY - JOUR
T1 - Qualitative systems mapping for complex public health problems
T2 - A practical guide
AU - Kiekens, Anneleen
AU - de Casterlé, Bernadette Dierckx
AU - Vandamme, Anne Mieke
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Kiekens et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2022/2
Y1 - 2022/2
N2 - Systems mapping methods are increasingly used to study complex public health issues. Visualizing the causal relationships within a complex adaptive system allows for more than developing a holistic and multi-perspective overview of the situation. It is also a way of understanding the emergent, self-organizing dynamics of a system and how they can be influenced. This article describes a concrete approach for developing and analysing a systems map of a complex public health issue drawing on well-accepted methods from the field of social science while incorporating the principles of systems thinking and transdisciplinarity. Using our case study on HIV drug resistance in sub-Saharan Africa as an example, this article provides a practical guideline on how to map a public health problem as a complex adaptive system in order to uncover the drivers, feedback-loops and other dynamics behind the problem. Qualitative systems mapping can help researchers and policy makers to gain deeper insights in the root causes of the problem and identify complexity-informed intervention points.
AB - Systems mapping methods are increasingly used to study complex public health issues. Visualizing the causal relationships within a complex adaptive system allows for more than developing a holistic and multi-perspective overview of the situation. It is also a way of understanding the emergent, self-organizing dynamics of a system and how they can be influenced. This article describes a concrete approach for developing and analysing a systems map of a complex public health issue drawing on well-accepted methods from the field of social science while incorporating the principles of systems thinking and transdisciplinarity. Using our case study on HIV drug resistance in sub-Saharan Africa as an example, this article provides a practical guideline on how to map a public health problem as a complex adaptive system in order to uncover the drivers, feedback-loops and other dynamics behind the problem. Qualitative systems mapping can help researchers and policy makers to gain deeper insights in the root causes of the problem and identify complexity-informed intervention points.
KW - Qualitative systems mapping
KW - public health
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85125310625&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0264463
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0264463
M3 - Article
C2 - 35213648
AN - SCOPUS:85125310625
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 17
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
IS - 2 February
M1 - e0264463
ER -
