Object: Focusing on the context of family businesses, this study seeks to articulate an integrated process model that explains how belief and trust in an opportunity take shape through sensemaking processes. The model links cycles of collective narration, ambiguity reduction, and routine stabilization, bridging the gap between assessment-oriented approaches to opportunity and interpretive, practice-based approaches. The intended contribution is to map a pathway in which opportunity belief is not a momentary, purely individual event, but a gradual, multilayered, and social process that begins in deep layers of meaning and culminates in operational framing. Within the article, this aim is elaborated by arguing for a multilevel, temporal model that connects environmental cues with narratives, identity, and family legacy.
Method: The study employed an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design within a pragmatist paradigm. In the first phase (qualitative study), semi-structured interviews were conducted with 28 founders and senior family members in family businesses and analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Purposeful and snowball sampling were used; coding proceeded in multiple cycles by two independent coders, discrepancies were resolved through analytic dialogue, and reliability was strengthened through review checks. This phase yielded the initial formulation of the model’s dimensions in the form of themes, categories, and codes. In the second phase, Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) was applied with the participation of 8 founders and senior family members to design the interaction matrix, apply transitivity, check the consistency of judgments, and derive hierarchical levels for the causal relations among themes.