A persistent challenge in qualitative research is synthesis. When you are working with large volumes of text (interviews, field reports, narrative accounts) across multiple countries and time periods, how do you move systematically from individual accounts to broader patterns? And how do you do so without flattening the complexity that makes qualitative data valuable in the first place?

This piece describes how causal mapping, combined with an AI-assisted coding workflow, helped address that challenge in a large, multi-country research and evaluation project and what researchers working with similarly complex qualitative datasets might take from the experience.

Bernadette Wright and Steve Wallis introduced knowledge mapping as a part of the evaluation profess.