The recent IJMR conference, ‘Stop Talking, Start Listening’, was treated to a fascinating review of a style of political and government research that has become increasingly prominent in recent years. Michelle Harrison CEO of TNS-BMRB presented an exploration of ‘Deliberative’ approaches in the government/citizen interface. Like the ‘Word of Mouth’ approaches explored last month, this represents a body of work that is clearly ‘not research as we know it’.
Jon Chandler 
26 Jan, 2010
Deliberative Research: Capturing What Consumers Say
The
world of healthcare market research has often looked to consumer research for
insight and inspiration; for new ways of addressing old and new problems. Developments
in the world of government policy and consultation suggest some new approaches
that healthcare research could look to and learn from.
Government represents one of the ‘big clients’ of market research. The ‘public’ usage of Market Research has now moved well beyond the testing and evaluation of promotions for public health or exhortations to drive carefully. Recent years have seen a massive growth in spending on public consultation processes by both central and local government. Michelle Harrison provided an interesting overview and endorsement of such ‘Deliberative Processes’ in public policy development.
Deliberative approaches are developing in many countries and have become commonplace in UK policy development; in ‘big’ policy debates, in science and technology, in addressing environmental issues, in aiding local decision making. Here the basic problem confronting policy developers is that political decisions are often a complex and awkward interweaving of pros and cons, whereas ‘public opinion’ as expressed in its first encounters with these decision situations is often a ‘knee jerk’ response. In this situation the one off focus group or vox pop is an unreliable and unhelpful vehicle.
What Deliberative approaches have tried to do is provide meaningful input from citizens into complex issues. Deliberation can be used to address issues such as what should be legal and what should not be allowed in genetic or stem cell research. Deliberative approaches can provide real and deep public consultation around how to reconcile the aspiration to ‘greener’ policies with the practicalities of disposal and recycling. Whilst government might be criticised for its highly selective approach to consultation [democracy when it suits] this exercise in consultation nevertheless provides a real counterpoint to traditional market research approaches.
Deliberative approaches are different from what is done in classic market research insofar as they self consciously strive to go beyond what people currently think. The deliberative process seeks to inform people over time, to upgrade their understanding of issues over time and most importantly to see how their responses change as they come to appreciate and understand more complex information and conflicting issues. What deliberative methods seek to do is provide an understanding of agreement and difference, to see how opinion shifts as information is shared.
To understand whether there is a role for deliberation in healthcare brand development we need to ask what is it that is different about deliberation and what benefits do these differences offer.
What is different about deliberation:
- Deliberative approaches take place over time, they involve multiple events or encounters with people rather than single events, these are progressive processes
- As this process progresses, Deliberative approaches will expand the knowledge base that people have, deliberative processes involve ‘up-skilling’ participants
- The goal is the identification of optimum policy solutions, not the identification of the ‘most popular’ options; Deliberative approaches are about problem solving.
The benefit of this type of process is that the people involved engage more deeply and because of this contribute to more meaningful outputs. Here the people involved contribute to development through a series of stepping stones, each of which builds incrementally on what has gone before. This incremental advance is made possible because there is an ongoing process and because those involved can take account of a wider and wider range of inputs.
In the past the healthcare arena has productively learned from approaches in the consumer sector. What is interesting about the Deliberative approach we see at work in the political arena is its potential applications in healthcare. Where this approach has come into its own in the political arena it is as an aid to problem solving.
Deliberative approaches have the potential to contribute in healthcare where the goal is problem solving in contrast with ‘testing’ or ‘evaluation’. A number of possible applications suggest themselves;
- Where the need is to develop an overall communications strategy and to balance and nuance a set of messages and data points within it, the stepping stone approach with its incremental building and learning may have more to offer than traditional ‘one off’ approaches
- Where there is a need to reconcile the competing potentials within a current or future portfolio, a Deliberative approach can take account of more factors to a deeper level
- Where there is a need to identify how behaviours can be changed by different flows of information over time, a deliberative approach provides us with an experimental framework to do this.
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