meta-modeling in software engineering and systems engineering among other disciplines, is the analysis, construction and development of the frames, rules, constraints, models and theories applicable and useful for modeling a predefined class of problems. As its name implies, this concept applies the notions of meta- and modeling.Please refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamodeling and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Modeling_Language

or please refer to http://pubs.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf9-doc/arch/chap34.html

You could read the first chapter of this book: Diclemente RJ, Crosby R, Kegler M. Emerging theories in health promotions practice and research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass; 2002. Also, I think this site might help: http://www.mind42.com, it is a page to create mind maps. The diagrams or charts it creates are not very attractive, but the program can help to show your concepts and contructs in a better organized and hierarchical way.

I'm not sure whether I exactly understand what you would like to represent in your model, but if you are thinking about representing people's goals and how different activities conflict with or contribute to the achievement of these goals, you might want to look at Eric Yu's i* ontology and it's visualization tools.

i*: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/km/istar/

Eric Yu: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~eric/

Have you tried framing analysis? I used it to document public health discourses for my phd.

See my article on framing obesity and influencing policy. Obesity reviews. There is a framing matrix in there that could be helpful.

I used the concept of a communicative chain of text and talk developed by Britt-Louise Gunnarsson in my dissertation.

She defines a “communication community” as a group, which shares norms, attitudes, and habits related to both spoken and written communication. Further, the socialization of such a community includes the acquisition of knowledge about and attitudes towards the patterns, functions, and so forth of both spoken and written language. She also addresses two specific communication genres, i.e., spoken and written discourse, which she sees as essential elements in group culture and interaction. A communication genre, like other genres, is a category of identity that has certain attributes, conventions, and agency.

I mapped the sequences of talk and text of a mental health commission over the year in which they were examining the state MH system. I used Gunnarsson's concept of genre systems as types of social actions and situated cognition to show how a policy decision is contextualized, based upon the situatedness of a person, a place, or historicity of an event. This chaining of text and talk allowed me to map the discourses of expert and everyday communication. I was able to extend a discursive analysis to show linkages across and among discourse communities, the use of specialized languages, and the interaction between text and talk across distance and over time.

Here is a link to her publications. If you like, I could send you the chapter in which I mapped the communicative chain.

It totally depend on what you want to articulate out of this and where you want to attach it...I think you are using a subjective discursive approach and want to develop something that is more objectively applicable to larger population contexts...if that is the case you need some of the connectors in between....systems theory is a frame in which that can be done...my grad students gravitate towards Urie Bronfenbrenner because of the ecological angle....my theorizing moves between systems/worldviews...and I use a metaphorical mapping approach based in the work of Lakoff/Johnson/Turner/Faucounnier to deal with the "levels of analysis" problems with which students have the most difficulty. I find that there is a lot of "meta" wannabe because of the "God-factor" in which researchers don't/can't sufficiently articulate their own situated-ness and how it contributes to what they are observing and the findings..."Stages of Change" Proshaska's transtheoretical model, McKeown's Determinants of Health is a meta model that is used in the health/education and other related interdisciplinary areas in which "meta" approaches are needed...when adding to the literature its alwo important to add to the way meta models are used

There´s a good open source software for argument mapping.

From their webseite: "An Argunet argument map visualises the structure of complex argumentations and debates as a graphical network."

This is a first introduction: http://www.argunet.org/2013/04/03/so-what-exactly-is-an-argument-map/, the editor is here: http://www.argunet.org/editor/

Hi Michael!

You and I are at the same point in our doctoral journey. I have sourced XMind to display the linkages in my data set. http://www.xmind.net/?utm_expid=12673998-1.0XT6E07cTQ67Cdy6qI89pA.0

I will also check out the sources noted by others in this thread. Some terrific advice in here!

Hi Gail and others. I apologise for not having the opportunity to reply to you all individually. There are some really excellent ideas in here as Gail says, and drawn from around the social sciences. I'm really taken with several of them and their underlying theoretical bases and off to explore some really cool stuff. Thank you all for your helpful suggestions and please keep 'em coming folks :)

Since you are asking about various pathways of action that are described by your informants, you might want to look at "narrative networks" as a possible representation. I have a paper with Martha Feldman that introduces the idea (Pentland, B. T. and Feldman, M. S. (2007) “Narrative Networks: Patterns of technology and organization” Organization Science, 18(5), 781-795) and it was applied recently in a healthcare context (Goh, J.M., Gao, G., and Agarwal, R. (2011). “Evolving Work Routines: The Adaptive Routinization of Technology in Healthcare.” Information Systems Research, Vol. 22, No. 3: pp. 565-585.) (And please accept my apologies for boosting my stuff here, it just seems like it might actually fit. All the best! )