Summary: Inclusion, consultation, engagement, and priority-setting are common recommendations for an all-of society approach to disaster management. In practice, these criteria can be difficult to fulfill with traditional focus groups. The Structured Interview Matrix (SIM) is an engaging and solution-oriented consultation method to facilitate discussions with large, diverse groups (up to 40 people). It aligns with the principles of community-based or community-led, participatory research projects, and can be used for either in-person or virtual participation. The purpose of this presentation is to explain the SIM method and how it has been used in disaster research and large group consultations. Given the involvement of participants, ethics approval is required for most research-related SIM consultations. For each example in this presentation, ethics approval was received, and participants signed a consent form before participation. Each SIM session is divided into three steps: 1) 1:1 interviews by participants; 2) small group deliberation to synthesize information from step 1; and 3) large group discussion of the findings and recommendations. Steps 2 and 3 are audio-recorded and analyzed with the field notes from interviews in step 1. The stepwise progression of the SIM method balances power within the group and ensures individual voices are integrated into the discussion, regardless of functional ability or organizational role. Further, it facilitates engagement through interactive activities, which create opportunities to network, exchange information, and strengthen community or organizational relationships. This presentation provides an overview of the SIM method and select examples from over 100 disaster-related applications, as well as information about how to access the facilitator manual, an open-access community tool. The intent is to prompt out-of-the-box thinking and solutions for conference attendees working with diverse communities or within complex organizations and provide resources for how to use the SIM method in different contexts.
Corneil et al. (Sun,) studied this question.