Tripoles

A tripole consists of a triangle with an element at each point. The respondents are asked to place their answer inside the triangle where they feel the balance most accurately represents his or her answer. Tripoles are very useful because they provide a way to give an answer that falls in the grey areas between multiple-choice options.

A tripole would look like this:

There are three examples of types of tripoles you can use:

1. Objective Facts

This type of tripole has objective facts or nouns for every element. This is for example useful to look at which topics are often addressed in stories, such as:

The community effort described in your story improved…

2. Balanced Values

The second type of bipole uses evenly balanced values at each end: one positive, one negative and one neutral. This bipole can for example be used to get an idea of the prevalent attitudes about a certain issue or levels of agreement:

Company attitudes about the effort in your story are…

3. All Negative or All Positive Values

The last type of tripole uses three values that are either all positive or all negative. This can be used to measure broader attitudes or opinions, such as:

The values of the leadership are…

Coming up with your own tripoles Although these are only three examples of tripoles, we are sure that you will be able to think of others. Coming up with the elements of your tripole depends on the type of tripole you have chosen, as for example, for the type of tripole with one positive, one negative and one neutral value, it is important that they are well balanced and actually represent a positive, negative and neutral variant of a certain value.

There is a variety of ways to come up with the elements of a tripole. The easiest way is to use a tripole from our database, the majority of which is based upon research. Another way to come up with tripoles is to conduct a small-scale pre-research before holding an inquiry to find certain values that are going around or are considered important in your organisation. If you repeat an inquiry over the course of a few years, which we highly recommend, the results of your previous inquiry can also form the basis of your next one. Repeated inquiries allow you to keep track of the development and spot the emergence of trends. Another possibility is looking into other research or evaluation that has been conducted in your organisation before that could help you to look for elements of your tripoles. The last option is that you could go to the literature about the topic you are investigating. For example, if you are looking into sustainability, there is plenty of literature that could point you in the right direction.