Social Science
Phase 1 — Methods
During Phase I, experimental participants were introduced to an eight-hour on-campus deliberation. Eighty percent of the 568 Phase 1 participants were compensated by receiving a Windows PC, with which they would continue discussions in Phase 2, and the rest received $100 and were asked to serve as a control group that would answer three questionnaires in Phase 2. Phase 1 of the VA Project study also served as a controlled experiment that separated the effect of IT-mediated information from the effects of face-to-face discussion.
Prior to Phase 1, recruits were given a short questionnaire over the phone to establish their initial positions on the policy issues to be discussed in Phase 1. The issues are all related to public school consolidation in Pittsburgh, where schools have appreciable overcapacity due to population decline. In particular, participants were asked to consider closing schools in the future generally, eliminating 4500 seats over three years specifically, eliminating middle schools by going to a K-8 system, adding small learning communities to the high schools, and extending the choice of schools to larger geographical regions.
In preparation for the experiments, VA Project staff spent considerable time gathering background information from actual stakeholders and opinion leaders from different perspectives regarding the school consolidation issue. They conducted personal interviews and consolidated background information, including statistics and comparisons with other school districts, both regional and national. Staff edited and summarized the information into a briefing on the topic designed to be neutral in opinion and as objective as possible, presenting all sides of the argument. The briefing would serve as introductory information for the participants. Moreover, the original material would be made available through hyperlinks from the web-based experimental interface.
During Phase 1, all respondents answered a web-based questionnaire and then were given 40 minutes to review IT-based information on the policy issues. Next, they were divided into one of the three experimental groups: face-to-face discussion, online real-time audio discussion, and a control group. The control group was given extra time to read and think about policy information provided online while other groups discussed the issues for 90 minutes. The control group read the policy information on individual PCs identical in set up and content to those provided to the other two experimental groups. This design offered substantial separation of information effects from the effects of discussion because very few participants would know relevant facts beyond those in the reading materials. To break up the day and also to look for possible information acquisition effects of discussion, participants were asked to read information about the topic of discussion again in the afternoon and to discuss a second time afterwards. The day ended with a concluding research questionnaire.
To accommodate possible social identity effects of online discussion, the three experimental groups of Phase 1 of the VA Project were further subdivided into groups that received a reminder of their citizenship and groups that did not. Citizenship reminders consisted of a photocopy of an American flag in a participant's room, the word "Citizen" appended to their name on their name tag, and the word "Citizen" appended to their name during online discussion, if the participant was in that condition. A short video prior to discussion also reminded those in the citizen condition of their citizenship, while the video for those not in the citizen condition did not.
The citizenship-reminder / no-citizenship reminder experiment was crossed with the three deliberation conditions: deliberation face-to-face (f2f), deliberation online, and no deliberation. This resulted in a 3X2 experimental design, as illustrated below:
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Deliberation Condition (Face-to-Face, Online, No Discussion) |
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|---|---|---|---|
Citizen Condition |
Citizen, F2F |
Citizen, Online |
Citizen, No Discussion |
No Citizen, F2F |
No Citizen, Online |
No Citizen, No Discussion |
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Source: Peter Muhlberger (2005) "The Virtual Agora Project: A Research Design for Studying Democratic Deliberation", Journal of Public Deliberation: Vol. 1: No. 1, Article 5.
http://services.bepress.com/jpd/vol1/iss1/art5.