This project is a pilot study of citizen deliberation of public issues, comparing Internet-based and face-to-face communication. The study responds to growing scholarly enthusiasm about citizen engagement with public issues though new modes of meaningful public discussion, with the aim of assessing the capacity of the Internet to serve deliberative functions. The main research question is: `How are processes of public deliberation on-line different from processes of public deliberation in face-to-face settings?` The approach of this project as a pilot is to explore a variety of prototype measures potentially useful in answering this question. The study draws on research in political philosophy delineating normative conceptions of the nature of political deliberation in a democracy. From survey research in political science, the study draws measures of opinion, attitudes, and trust. From psychological and sociological research on small groups, the study draws a framework for analyzing the content of small group processes. From research on computer-mediated communication, the study draws baseline expectations for differences between face-to-face and Internet-based communication. The research design is experimental, using ten groups of seven subjects. Five will engage in on-line deliberation and five in face-to-face deliberation of two public policy issues. Three exploratory measurement techniques will be used. The first is pre-deliberation and post-deliberation surveys of individual opinion, designed to measure quantifiable shifts in positions on the policy problems, group polarization effects, and the like. The second technique is direct observation and qualitative analysis of group processes, using an eight-dimensional coding scheme for identifying the emergence of norms, roles, leadership, innovativeness, communication styles, and other aspects of small group dynamics. The third is two post-deliberation de-briefings, one in-group, and one privately by telephone, designed to capture participants' reactions, degree of satisfaction, and so on. A separate follow-up study is envisioned, to be designed and conducted after this pilot study is completed. That future study will use the measures that emerge from this pilot study as the most reliable, valid, and analytically useful, to examine more subjects, with a full set of controls, and with greater statistical power.
