JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Public deliberation – or deliberative democracy – is a method used to elicit informed perspectives and justifiable solutions to ethically fraught or contentious issues that affect multiple stakeholder groups with conflicting interests. Deliberative events bring together stakeholders (deliberants) who are provided with empirical evidence on the central issue or concern then asked to discuss the evidence, consider the issue from a societal perspective, and collectively work toward a justifiable resolution. There is increasing interest in the method, which warrants clear guidance for evaluating the quality of its use in research. Most of the existing literature on measuring deliberation quality emphasizes quality of deliberants’ inputs (e.g. engagement, evidence of compromise) during deliberative sessions. Fewer researchers have framed quality in terms of facilitator inputs, and those who have tend to examine inputs that are consistent with group process. The theory, process, and purpose of public deliberation is distinct from focus groups or other group-based discussions and warrants a mechanism for measuring quality in terms of facilitator fidelity to the principles and processes of deliberative democracy. We wanted to systematically assess the quality of our deliberation, which focused on ethical conflicts in minor consent for biomedical HIV prevention research. We defined quality as the extent to which facilitator inputs were consistent with four core principles of deliberative democracy including: equal participation, respect for the opinions of others, adoption of a societal perspective, and the reasoned justification of ideas. In addition to these principles, we added two related to key goals of the deliberation: expression of diverse opinions, and compromise or movement toward consensus. In this tutorial, we describe how we defined and measured quality of facilitator inputs relative to core principles of deliberative democracy. We demonstrate our coding structure and outcomes and provide a blueprint for other researchers to use in the evaluation of their own deliberative events.