ChoiceDialoguesâ„¢ identify which choices the public will be willing to support and under what conditions. These daylong citizen dialogues explore what sort of health care system citizens want to see in the future, what balance they want to see between the roles of individuals, employers and the public sector, what tradeoffs they are willing to accept and under what conditions.

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Watch Recent ChoiceDialogues in Mississippi

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ChoiceDialoguesâ„¢: The Methodology
ChoiceDialogue methodology differs from polls and focus groups in its purpose, advance preparation, and depth of inquiry.

• Purpose. ChoiceDialogues are designed to do what polls and focus groups cannot do and were never developed to do. While polls and focus groups provide an accurate snapshot of people’s current thinking, ChoiceDialogues are designed to predict the future direction of people’s views on important issues where they have not completely up their minds, or where changed circumstances create new challenges that need to be recognized and addressed. Under these conditions (which apply to most major issues), people’s top-of-mind opinions are highly unstable, and polls and focus groups can be very misleading. ChoiceDialogues enable people to develop their own fully worked-through views on such issues (in dialogue with their peers) even if they previously have not given it much thought. By engaging representative samples of the population in this way, ChoiceDialogues provide unique insight into how people’s views change as they learn, and can be used to identify areas of potential public support where leaders can successfully implement policies consonant with people’s core values.
• Advance Preparation. ChoiceDialogues require highly trained facilitators and (above all) the preparation of special workbooks that brief people on the issues. These workbooks formulate a manageable number of research-based scenarios, which are presented as a series of values-based choices, and they lay out the pros and cons of each scenario in a manner that allows participants to work though how they really think and feel about each one. This tested workbook format enables people to absorb and apply complex information quickly.
• Depth of Inquiry. Polls and focus groups avoid changing people’s minds, while ChoiceDialogues are designed to explore how and why people’s minds change as they learn. While little or no learning on the part of the participants occurs in the course of conducting a poll or focus group, ChoiceDialogues are characterized by a huge amount of learning. ChoiceDialogues are day-long, highly structured dialogues – 24 times as long as the average poll and 4 times as long as the average focus group. Typically, participants spend the morning familiarizing themselves with the scenarios and their pros and cons and developing (in dialogue with each other) their vision of what they would like to have happen in the future. They spend the afternoons testing their preferences against the hard and often painful tradeoffs they would need to make to realize their values. To encourage learning, the ChoiceWork methodology is based on dialogue rather than debate – this is how public opinion really forms, by people talking with friends, neighbors and co-workers. These 8-hour sessions allow intense social learning, and both quantitative and qualitative measures are used to determine how and why people’s views change as they learn.

Steps in a ChoiceDialogueâ„¢ Project

1) Archival analysis of polls (or conducting a special one) and other research to provide a baseline reading on what stage of development public opinion has reached;

2) The identification of critical choices and choice scenarios on the issue and their most important pros and cons, and the preparation of a workbook built around those scenarios in a tested format for use in the dialogues;

3) A series of one-day dialogue sessions with representative cross-sections of the population. Each dialogue involves about 40 participants, lasts one full day and is videotaped. A typical one-day session includes the following:

• Initial orientation (including the purpose of the dialogue and the use to be made of the results, the nature of dialogue and ground-rules for the session, introduction of the issue and some basic facts about it);
• Introduction of the choice scenarios on the issue, and a questionnaire to measure participants’ initial views;
• Dialogue among participants (in smaller groups and in plenary) on the likely good and bad results that would occur as a consequence of each choice if it were adopted, and constructing a vision of the future they would prefer to see;
• A second, more intensive round of dialogue among the participants (again both in smaller groups and in plenary) working through the concrete choices and tradeoffs they would make or support to realize their vision;
• Concluding comments from each participant on how their views have changed in the course of the day (and why), and a questionnaire designed to measure those changes.

4) An analysis of how people’s positions evolve during the dialogues. We take before and after readings on how and to what extent people’s positions have shifted on each choice as a result of the dialogue. This analysis is both quantitative and qualitative.

5) A briefing to leaders to make sense of the results. The briefing summarizes what matters most to people on the issue, how positions are likely to evolve as surface opinion matures into more considered judgment, the underlying assumptions and values that shape that evolution, and the opportunities for leadership this creates.