Taking the Citizens’ Jury online
Female lawyer (Credit: Mateus Campos, Unsplash)
Many of our clients come to us with complex, knotty public policy issues, and we need to give people time and (often detailed) information to enable them to form considered views. Over the past eighteen months, we have become adept at carrying out deliberative research online.
A recent brief from the Legal Services Board (LSB) needed an even more involved approach to getting the public’s input on policy development. The LSB is currently considering the highly controversial and complicated issue of whether lawyers should face ongoing checks on their competence throughout their careers. There are strong views on all sides of the debate, and yet the public has very little understanding in this area. It was the perfect subject for a Citizens’ Jury, a technique that involves bringing together a small group of members of the public to hear expert ‘evidence’ from a range of sources on a complex topic, before reaching a consensus on a key question. The process usually takes place over time, with ‘jurors’ building up rapport and having time to review and question the evidence together. The final part – sitting together in a room to deliberate – is a critical part of the process.
However, in times of Covid-secure research, we did not have the option of bringing people together in person. We know that online approaches can make it harder to build rapport and enable the real-time deliberation that is key to the ‘jury’ process, so we had to do things a little differently. Here are our tips for creating a virtual Citizens’ Jury:
Keep it small: The temptation with online research is to up the numbers, because you don’t have to spend extra on catering and travel! However, you’re trying to build trust and ensure participants get to know each other over the course of the research, so it helps to keep the group small.
Start with an informal live online session: it really helped for participants to ‘meet’ each other on screen before we started with the online forum. We started with introductions, reinforcing the importance of the role they played. We ended with some ‘getting to know you’ type questions to allow some easy conversation and start the connections forming! By the time they reconvened three weeks later to deliberate live online, participants knew each other pretty well!
Video evidence: we needed participants to consider and review a large amount of new (and sometimes dry!) material. To help participants understand and engage with the evidence, we presented nearly all the materials as voiced-over video animations. We also had ‘talking heads’ videos with industry stakeholders giving their expert evidence to show the range of perspectives on the issue.
A clear question: we worked with the LSB to ensure that – from the start – we were clear about what the final question to jurors would need to answer. We used quick polls to ascertain participants’ response to this question throughout the research. This enabled us to track changes in opinion and the impact of different pieces of evidence.
This approach was highly successful: we had more detailed responses, greater interaction and lower drop-out on this project than on many other online deliberative studies, in spite of the demands we placed on participants. In their final online deliberation, jurors worked collaboratively – and independently – to agree a clear consensus, backed by well-reasoned arguments. Ultimately, there was unanimous support for regulators to introduce more specific rules and requirements for lawyers to demonstrate ongoing competence.
Any decisions the LSB takes are likely to be high profile and face challenge, so they wanted to seek broader public opinion on the issues. We cover the difficult task of running a quantitative survey on such a complex and controversial topic separately in another article!
We will be presenting and discussing the implications of the research findings at an event with key industry stakeholders in the Autumn but, for a sneak preview, click here to see our report.