Developing and applying a deductive coding framework to assess the goals of Citizen/Community Jury deliberations

Area of Science:

• Public Health
• Health Policy
• Citizen Engagement

Background:

• Public participation in health policy decision-making enhances decision quality and legitimacy.
• Citizen/Community Juries (CJs) are a method for gathering informed community perspectives on complex health topics.
• Existing reporting standards for CJ processes are established, but quality assessment of deliberations needs further development.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a framework for assessing the quality of deliberations within Citizen/Community Juries (CJs).
• To ensure that CJ deliberations align with their underlying goals of informed public participation.

Main Methods:

• Literature search for existing frameworks on CJ deliberation quality.
• Identification of CJ goals and mapping existing framework items to these goals.
• Generation of new framework items where existing frameworks were insufficient.
• Operationalization into a deductive coding framework and testing against CJ transcripts.

Main Results:

• A single, operationalized framework with four deliberation and four recommendation elements was developed.
• Deliberation elements include jurors' preferences, engagement, use of expert information, and enrichment.
• Recommendation elements cover clarity, relevance to the question, justification, and societal perspective.

Conclusions:

• The developed framework aligns well with the actual processes observed in Citizen/Community Juries.
• Further validation, generalizability, and reliability testing of the framework are planned for future research.