Playing God: Understanding How Citizens Hear, Assess and Decide Consumer Claims in Citizens' Juries

Abstract

A citizens' jury is a group of about 12 to 24 ordinary citizens, selected using random and stratified sampling who deliberate on a public policy issue with the intention of influencing the outcome. The study aimed to explore how citizen jurors hear and respond to consumer voices in healthcare citizens' jury settings. The study found that consumer voices are heard and assessed by jurors as consumer claims, leading to the developmet of a theory that enhances our understanding of how citizen jurors hear, assess and decide consumer claims amid the purported neutralily of healthcare citizens' juries. The theory comprises a set of integrated categories and concepts and provides an interpretive understanding about the relationships belween these concepts that can be tested in future work. Constructivist grounded theory was employed to inductively explore the phenomenon of consumer voices in healthcare citizens' juries. Three citizens' juries (comprising 51 jurors in total) were observed and 22 jurors from one jury were provided with diaries and were interviewed. The theory was developed and verified through simultaneous data collection and analysis and integration of the concepts and categories constructed during the sludy and the existing literature (Charmaz, 2014).