Page 43 - Mike Ratner CC - WISR Complete Dissertation - v6

and exploring the the Metasphere that participants and facilitators generate as this provides the

foundation for the questions I have explored and researched over the years that is now brought

forth through this WISR.edu dissertation graduate project.

Research Questions

The questions to be explored through this research focuses on understanding the aware

experience of facilitators and participants in Community Conversation groups when one speaks to

represent ‘their point of view’ particularly in examining and observing as tension or disagreements

emerge. The first question asks: What was experienced in the dialogue? The research then

undertakes a multifaceted dimension of the “Community Conversation” in exploring how

‘consciously’ members are as they decipher and collectively move beyond conflicts and

disagreements that may surface during dialogue processes as they are aware of their participation.

Many studies and previous research indicate that psychological and social well-being are

directly affected by the ways individuals think about their “possible selves,” a concept introduced

by Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius in 1986. These imagined selves are defined as “individuals’

ideas of what they would like to become, what they are afraid of becoming, what they could

become” (Penland et al. 2000, 963). Research indicates that students with well-developed negative

possible selves and/or few strategies for imagining positive possible selves in the university

environment for example are significantly more at risk than their counterparts who have a

repertoire of positive possible selves (Christie et al. 2008; McElwee and Haugh 2009).

The ‘Sociopsychological Conception of Collective Identity’ (David, Bar-Tal 2009)

delineates the complex structure of collective identity by incorporating two levels of analysis. The

first, the micro level pertains to individual society members’ recognition of and categorization as

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