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# Describe your participant groups

On this page you can think about the groups of people you will be asking to share stories with you. By thinking carefully about your participant groups now, you can lay the ground for making solid decisions later in the project.

## What to do here

Think about groups of people whose stories you need to hear in your project. If your project is simple, you might have only one group. If so, you can describe that group here. However, you might need to hear from multiple groups of people in your project. For example:

- Some people might have more authority or power than others. People in one group might defer to the other, so you need to keep them separate to they can all speak freely.
- Maybe you will have two groups that don't agree. Maybe people won't want to speak in the presence of the other group.
- Maybe your groups just have different backgrounds. Maybe they won't feel comfortable opening up to each other.

In any of those cases, create a separate description of each participant group you expect to hear from.

## Connections to other pages

The descriptions you enter here (along with your description of resources) will create the recommendations you see on these pages:

- story collection venues
- story eliciting questions
- questions about stories
- questions about participants
- story collection sessions
- sensemaking sessions

If you don't want to use NarraFirma's recommendation system, you can skip this page.

## Frequently-asked questions

### What if I can't answer a question?

Choose the answer "unknown."

### What if I can't answer most of the questions?

In that case, you should probably spend some more time getting to know your participant groups before you go on to the rest of the planning stages. Talk to people; observe people talking; ask other people who are more familiar. Then come back and see if you are ready to describe your groups.

### Does creating separate groups on this page limit what I can do later on?

No. The participant groups you define here only influence the recommendations you will see throughout the project. Creeating separate groups will not stop you from including any or all of your participants in any part of your project.